


Sun and Sea

by scrappybook



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: 2018-2019 Season, 2019 Worlds, Future Fic, Getting Together, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-06 22:26:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15204779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scrappybook/pseuds/scrappybook
Summary: For the first time, Javi goes to Worlds not as a competitor but as a spectator. His journey there takes an entire season, all the same.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't going to write this, but then I had too many post-Olympic feelings so I thought: okay, I'll write a short, fluffy, get-together ficlet to soothe my woes. But then, during this not!off-season, feelings somehow turned into FEELINGS, and that ficlet turned into... this. 
> 
> A few more notes:  
> 1\. This was written in June/July 2018, so participation and (especially) results in 2018-19 competitions may or may not hold true (though I did manage to squeeze in correct GP assignments!)  
> 2\. Javi's GF is effectively an OC in this fic, so her name was changed accordingly

Despite the early-spring chill, the air is electric with anticipation. The people, predominantly middle-aged Japanese women, are patiently excited, and their animated chattering sends sparks through the staleness of waiting in a seemingly endless line. The more experienced of them have packed water and snacks to share, and others have brought folding fans in preparation for the climbing afternoon sun.

Nestled among them, comfortably alone, Javi rises to his toes and peers over their bobble of heads. The crowd extends in front and behind him like a shoreless sea, and he’s suddenly, deeply glad for his thin yet apparently-effective guise of glasses, full facial hair, and low-pulled Eskimo hat. No one seems to have noticed him, yet; or, if they did, they must have been either too shy or too polite to approach him. Either way, he indulges in this strange, uncertain anonymity.

Minutes pass. It feels deceptively peaceful, like the eve of battle.

Then, the women in front of him pick up their bags, take three steps forward, then set their bags back down on the ground. He closes the gap unthinkingly. He’s been shuffling along the line to enter the arena for the past two hours or so, but a few hours more is nothing in the grand scheme of things. He stares up at the dome of the arena, looming ahead, and he knows there’s a whole world in there. Its gravity is undeniable.

The truth is, he hadn’t thought he’d be here at all, this time last year. He’d thought he’d been ready to leave that world behind, but while he tried to walk away it seems that all those steps have instead led him back to here.

Suddenly restless, he tugs at the strap of his backpack and digs a hand into the pocket of his parka. There are precious things hidden away in each: The plush softness inside his backpack is a secret, for now, and in his pocket he finds the smooth surface and sharp edges of his printed ticket. It’s strange to hold, as he’s never needed one before, but he appreciates how grounding it feels to have this paper promise in his hand.

His thumb brushes over the raised, black ink: _2019 World Figure Skating Championships_.

Almost there, he thinks.

\----------

It starts in August, in Toronto.

Javi returns to TCC at the end of summer feeling lighter than he had since even before Sochi, almost a lifetime ago. There’s a youthfulness within him that he’d thought he had lost after leaving home for skating, but he doesn’t question how or why he feels this way now. Not everyone is so lucky, he knows.

There was a while both before and after the Olympics when he’d thought he’d be done with competitions for good. He’d withdrawn from Worlds, and in that extended off-season he’d finally been able to spend time with Rosa in the way that she deserved. Although she’d understood and supported his need to focus on his skating before the Games, he knows that she hadn’t been entirely happy with just how much time they’d spent apart, and naturally so. Still, it was all worth it, in the end: he has his Olympic medal, and he has a future with a woman he loves.

At least, that’s how he’d felt until the early summer months.

Somewhere along the line, among the whirlwind of media events in Spain, touring in Canada, and performing in Japan, he’d find himself alone, sometimes. In these rare, quiet spaces, he’d begin to feel an itch in his bones, and he’d known, then, that he wasn’t quite done. Rosa hadn’t been pleased with his decision to continue competing for one more season, but in truth there had been no other way for him to go.

With the promise to keep in touch as often as he can, he flies out from Madrid at the end of July, and he knows he’s made the right choice when he walks through the familiar glass doors of his home rink.

The staff and skaters at TCC are quick to greet him and warm to welcome him back. He’s still smiling when he meets with Brian, and together they map out the contours of his final season. As they’d previously discussed, albeit a bit rushed and haphazardly backstage in Kobe during Fantasy on Ice, his planned competitions will be dwindling down to Japan Open in October, Spanish Nationals in December, and then Europeans in January. Even for this ragtag half-season, though, he’ll need to train and learn new programs, and so they build a schedule that extends until the end of January.

He’s kept busy with the mundanities of resettling into his old life in Toronto, and so he doesn’t get back onto the ice until the end of the week, when he joins Tracy’s stroking class. It’s hard, physically, getting back into the swing of things, but the satisfaction of seeing his plaque on the wall spurs him onwards, and he finds himself enjoying the familiar exercises and focusing a little more on his edgework.

Between sets, he chats with Evgenia, jokes with Jason, and encourages Boyang, grinning all the while. It’s fun to be training alongside Brian’s new adoptees, and it’s freeing—exhilarating, even—to be skating without fear of what the new season may bring.

Yuzuru isn’t there, but he figures he’ll see him sooner or later, one of these days.

He doesn’t, not for the entire following week, and by the end Javi spends more time thinking about where Yuzuru might be than about his own skating. He finds Brian in his office after class, as discretely as he can.

“Where’s Yuzu?” he asks.

Brian’s face falls, and Javi’s heart leaps into his throat.

“He’s at PT right now,” Brian says, looking down and shuffling around the papers on his desk.

While physical therapy is like bread and butter for all athletes, it’s particularly concerning that Yuzuru had scheduled his to coincide with their group stroking classes. “Is it…” he frantically flips through his memories of Yuzuru’s rehab-by-ice-show for anything that might have aggravated the injury, “I mean, is it that bad?”

Brian sighs. “I don’t mean to scare you, Javi. It’s just, that’s as much as I can tell you. Or anyone, for that matter.” He sits back in his chair and crosses his arms across his chest. He’s quiet for a long moment. “But between you and me,” Brian relents, giving him a pointed look; Javi nods in avid agreement of silence, “his ankle’s getting better. It’s not quite there yet, but I’m optimistic.”

He blinks through the flood of relief. “So I’ll see him soon, then?”

Apparently good news must come hand in hand with the bad, because Brian only grimaces. “He’ll be back for the stroking classes soon, I hope, but… Really, it’s not his health that’s the problem, here.”

“I don’t…” he trails off, suddenly uncertain of his place in all of this.

Brian unwinds his arms to rub at his temples. “We’ve… well. Let’s just say, he’s concerned about information getting out to certain people in certain places,” he confides, “so he’s been training at a separate rink. I mean,” he leans forward to look at the calendar on his desk, “he really does have PT at around this time, but otherwise… yeah. It’s really… it’s really not ideal.”

But it’s only August, Javi doesn’t say.

Instead, he offers a few awkward reassurances and doesn’t ask any more questions. Brian waves him off with a wry smile, and he goes to the gym as usual, his brain churning. Brian may not have told him much, but his years spent training beside Yuzuru have taught him all he needs to find him.

Early the next morning, much too early for a scheduled day off, he drags himself out of bed and packs up his skates. Instead of going to TCC, though, he takes the bus to the nearby rink where he had skated when they’d needed to train separately. From the outside, the place looks deserted, but the front doors are unlocked.

The first thing he notices is the music, faint and unfamiliar. It’s a long way from the door to the rink, but even as he approaches he gets no closer to recognizing the song. It’s loud and sounds almost angry, and he’s pretty sure he’s never heard it before. He spots a crumpled jacket on the bleachers, an open suitcase on the ground, and a black boom box on the boards, with Pooh resting comfortably beside it. The song’s in Japanese, he realizes just as he catches a flash of black rounding the corner of the rink. He steps onto the bleachers, loud and ungainly, then sits beside the Team Japan jacket and starts lacing up his boots.

He’s nearly done with the first boot when the music suddenly cuts off. He looks up, a smile already half-formed on his face, and he finds Yuzuru leaning against the boards on his elbows, eyeing him seriously from the distance. He ducks back down to hide his grin, and he hurries to finish tying off his second boot as well.

Yuzuru is circling the rink impatiently by the time he hobbles down the bleachers and steps onto the ice. “Brian tell you to talk to me?” he says in place of ‘hello.’

“Um, no?” Javi answers, catching up smoothly to Yuzuru’s agitated, near breakneck pace. They haven’t seen each other in over a month, but skating next to him feels as natural as always.

Yuzuru shoots him a look over his shoulder, almost offensively disbelieving. “Then how you know I’m here?”

“Hey,” he retorts, “I don’t need Brian to know where to find you. Really, where else would you be, especially at this time in the morning? Not at TCC, so either here or your apartment. Besides,” he points out, “you didn’t look very surprised to see me, either.”

Yuzuru is quiet, but he gradually slows to a more ambling speed. They circle around a handful more times before he speaks. “I don’t know what to do,” he admits. “Before Sochi, I focused on Sochi; before Pyeongchang, I focused on Pyeongchang. Now, I don’t know about Beijing, but everywhere, eyes. I don’t want them knowing so much.”

“Who, uh,” he tries to be diplomatic, “Who are we talking about, exactly?”

“Everyone,” Yuzuru replies, dramatic and entirely unhelpful.

“Okay, so the newcomers, you mean,” he decodes, and Yuzuru’s silence is answer enough. “You and Brian talk about this at all? Or did you just, sort of, start skating here and never went back?” Because that’s precisely something Yuzuru would do when he’s feeling vulnerable and sulking like this.

“We talked,” Yuzuru mumbles in halfhearted defense.

“Yuzu,” he sighs. “It’s been two weeks already, at least. Are you really planning on training here for the entire season?”

“Jeff and Shae already choreographed my programs,” Yuzuru protests, clearly keen on sharing his master plan with someone who will listen, “and we always come here for choreo if we need more work, anyway. I already know the stroking exercises, I can practice myself. Spins, too. It can work.”

“And what about your jumps?” Javi asks, just to humor him.

“Ghislain’s been helping me,” he exclaims triumphantly.

“Oh my god,” he groans. They slow to a stop by the boards. “Ghislain’s in on this too?”

Yuzuru takes a quick drink from his water bottle and shrugs.

Javi side-eyes him, unconvinced. “So, in other words, he agreed to come out here and help with your jumps while you’re still ‘going to PT,’ but he has no idea of your, uh, long-term plans.”

“But he’d say yes,” Yuzuru argues. “I think.”

“Yuzu,” he chides, and a part of him is surprised by how easy it is to have this conversation with him, now that they’re no longer rivals. “I know this is hard for you, and that things are more complicated now, but you know you can’t train here like this for the entire season, right? If you’re really worried, talk to Brian, okay? You know he’ll listen.”

He reaches for Pooh, squishing its face to entertain himself. He half expects Yuzuru to tell him to stop, or to rescue his beloved companion from the torment, but Yuzuru sidles up to him instead, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, and only watches as he continues to contort Pooh’s face into a myriad of expressions.

After a moment of silence, Yuzuru sighs. He shifts and turns to rest his forehead on Javi’s shoulder. “I know it’s stupid,” he mutters, and the warmth of his breath seeps through Javi’s shirt and heats his skin. “That’s why I say, I don’t know what to do.”

“Ah, Yuzu,” he says, returning Pooh to the boards with a pat on the head, feeling for a moment like a wise sage, “it’s not stupid, it’s important. And you already know what you need to do, don’t you?”

Yuzuru grunts, petulant.

Javi looks down at his black mess of hair and can only smile. “But maybe you just needed me to ask you to come back,” he teases, “like Romeo under Juliet’s balcony.”

He knows Yuzuru had studied the play, back in the day, and so he waits for him to make fun of him, to tell him that that’s not what’d happened in the story. Oddly enough, though, Yuzuru doesn’t take the bait.

“Yeah,” he says distractedly, lifting his head. He then gives a long squeeze to Pooh’s hands, and skates away.

\----------

The seats in the arena feel as if they’re shrinking by the hour. They’re almost four hours into the Men’s Short Program, and his sore bottom and strained eyes are vividly reminding him why he hadn’t watched the entirety of an event, especially an ISU Championships, live from the stands in almost a decade.

Still, he reflects as they wait for Aliev’s scores, it was nice to see some of the young, up-and-coming talent in the earlier groups, plus some of the other skaters hailing from smaller figure skating countries as well. It’s even nicer to be able to watch and appreciate them as an objective spectator without feeling the compulsive need to dissect their abilities as a competitor.

Although he knows many of the skaters from over the years, so far he’s been able to watch the competition without feeling much anxiety or worry. He winces but cheers encouragements whenever someone falls, and he’s not shy to give a loud whoop whenever someone lands a particularly nice jump. He claps before and after each person skates, and he claps and shouts after the scores are finally announced and Aliev finally breaks 100, too.

By now, his hands are a little red and his voice a bit sore, but even with the cramped seating it’s easy to admit that he’s having fun. It’s a different sort of enjoyment compared to the nervous ecstasy of delivering a good skate, of course, but it tells him that perhaps he wasn’t wrong to have retired after Europeans this past January. And, it tells him that Laura had been right, that his mistake had been personal rather than professional, and he’s not sure if that makes things better or worse.

On the plus side, he thinks as the Zamboni comes out to repair the ice, he’ll probably be too tired to feel nervous for the final flight.

He’s wrong again, of course.

When the final six come out from behind the curtain for their six-minute warmup, he feels his heartrate suddenly skyrocket. He squeezes his backpack between his legs, and he leans forward and squints to find that familiar shape down in the crowd by the boards. He finds Brian first, then sees him:

Yuzuru is swaying from side to side and rocking his head to whatever music is playing in his earphones, lost from this world to his own.

It’s hard to believe that he’s finally seeing him again for the first time in almost three months, and the distance exaggerates the surreal quality of it all, distorting his vision into something like a dream. From his seat high up in the stands, it’s easy to imagine that that bobbing head of black hair could belong to anyone, that Yuzuru could be anyone, and that in the end he doesn’t know him at all.

But then, the gates open, the skaters break out onto the ice, and he finds that he can breathe again: Whether from this seat, the furthest ones on the rafters, or even from the rooftop itself, Yuzuru on the ice is undeniable.

It doesn’t take him long to realize that he’s not the only one who’s come for him. It seems as if the entire arena is watching Yuzuru on the ice, breathing with him, moving with him, praying for him. Groups of eyes turn when he turns, cameras following and chattering, and he wonders if Yuzuru can feel his power over them all.

Six minutes pass by quicker from the stands than from within the rink, and before he can fully brace himself all the skaters have cleared the rink, save one.

Yuzuru is skating first.

In the 30 seconds that it takes for Yuzuru to assume his position at center ice, he opens the backpack at his feet and pulls out a fuzzy, round Pooh plush. He knows it’s nearly impossible to find a Pooh toy that Yuzuru hasn’t already been offered by his legion of fans after every competition, but somehow he’d liked the squat, nearly spherical shape of this from the moment he saw it, and he’d wanted it anyway. He squeezes it to his chest, and it helps, a little, but he still feels more nervous than he’d had before his own short program at Europeans.

The music starts.

Yuzuru moves, and he takes the crowd with him. He has them clapping with the beat, roaring after a buttery smooth 4Lo, cheering during his spins and step sequence. He has them swooning with the high kick after a perfect 3A, then gasping and screaming when the planned 4S-3T combo turns into a 4S-2T after a tilted and just-barely-saved landing on the quad. It’s a wild, wild ride, and the arena rises to its feet while he’s still in his final spin.

He jumps and whoops when Yuzuru takes his final pose, shaking his Pooh in the air like a flag.

It’s fun being a fan, he thinks, as his neighbors laugh at his exuberance and show him their Pooh-ear headbands, Japanese flags, and handmade Yuzuru Hanyu banners. He wonders briefly if they do indeed recognize him but are too polite to ask him why he’s hiding up in the stands, or if his beard and glasses are truly that disarming of a disguise, but either way he’s glad he’s come, glad to have known this side of Yuzuru that everyone else sees.

As Yuzuru gives Brian a hug and makes his way to the Kiss and Cry, the jumbotron starts showing slo-mo replays of the jumping passes. He’s busy smoothing out the wrinkles from Pooh’s body after his rough handling when the crowd suddenly roars. He looks up, and blinks.

Whoever’s behind the jumbotron must have eagle eyes, for he sees his own face on the screen, whooping and waving around his Pooh bear like a madman, side by side as Yuzuru is shown in his final spin. His face burns as his neighbors turn to look at him, and his skin itches with the sound of someone screaming a few rows behind him. There’s nowhere to hide, though, so he quirks his lips into a semblance of a smile and waves at the people around him.

Then, merciless, the camera cuts back live to the Kiss and Cry and zooms in on Yuzuru’s face, his eyes wide and bewildered as they peer up from behind his bundled, yellow towel. The next second cuts back to include Brian beside him, expression indiscernible despite the smile. On the screen, Brian leans over, whispers a few words into Yuzuru’s ear, then settles back and pats him reassuringly on his thigh. Yuzuru blinks back to himself. He nods as he finishes wiping his face, and then he holds up Pooh and gives a wave with its paw.

It’s over a matter of seconds, but from where Javi’s sitting each one feels like an absolute eternity. Yuzuru didn’t look very happy to see him, he reflects in a panic. Neither did Brian, for that matter. Maybe he shouldn’t have come, he thinks, but a quick glance to the side tells him that he’s too far from the aisle to make his escape now. It’s too late, anyway, they and everyone else in the arena already know he’s here, and—

_“And the scores, please—“_

\----------

September comes, fast and fierce; with it, the first competitions of the season.

He still doesn’t know what had transpired between Yuzuru and Brian, or how their current arrangement stands, but Brian had clapped him firmly on the back the next time he saw him. A few days later, Yuzuru had joined the group stroking lessons, and by the middle of August he had resumed his usual training schedule at TCC. It feels right to have Yuzuru there on the ice with him, even if sometimes only as a blur in the corner of his eyes.

With the missing piece of the puzzle now in place, everything seems to be back on track, finally, and it’s good to be back.

A part of him had worried that it’d feel odd to be training for a half-season, with one foot in and one foot out, but the schedule he’d created with Brian turns out to be surprisingly dense. He ends up spending a bit more time between the rink and the gym than he’d originally anticipated, but overall he finds himself adjusting smoothly back into the familiar pace of an athlete’s life.

Even more surprising, though, is how quickly Yuzuru seems to have settled into the new season, too.

In a way, he had suspected that Yuzuru would have a bit of a rocky start. Knowing that the weight of his second Olympic title would follow him, it would only be natural for that added pressure to increase the intensity with which he trained. And so, witnessing the strange tensions between Yuzuru and Brian didn’t alarm him, per se, but it did alert him to the ways in which things could unravel. And, it also showed him the ways in which he could help.

The truth is, he and Yuzuru will never again compete against each other directly. For all that they are still training in the same rink and for the same discipline, they are no longer fighting for the same medals; the Olympics will remain the last podium that they’ll ever share. They’ve both reached their goals of a repeat gold and a medal, and the desperation that had clouded the previous season seems to have since dissipated for them both.

There’s something about this new reality that lets him laugh and drape his arms around Yuzuru’s shoulders, when before he’d perhaps only smile; or reach out and rub a hand up and down his side, when before he might not have done anything at all.

It lets him slide into the round booth when he spots him in the cafeteria after practice one day, despite the stark and guarded space around the entire table whenever Yuzuru’s there.

“Hey,” he greets, taking note of the bagged ice Yuzuru’s got on his right ankle.

Yuzuru looks up and takes his earbuds out. “Javi!” he beams. He scoots a little closer, careful not to dislodge the ice.

“So your first comp’s in a few days,” he says.

“Yeah,” Yuzuru agrees lightly, “feeling a little nervous.”

“Oh please,” he says, complete with a suitably dramatic eye-roll, “it’s not like you’re going to lose at Autumn Classic.”

Yuzuru wrinkles his nose and pokes him in the stomach. “I lost last year.”

“Fair enough,” Javi grins, swatting his hand away. “Ankle okay?”

“Mhmm,” he nods. “Just normal icing, after practice.” He wiggles his toes for a few moments, then perks up. “Javi, your first competition is soon, too!”

“Oh please,” he says again, “nobody loses at Japan Open.”

Yuzuru laughs openly and doesn’t disagree.

They sit in a companionable silence, resting their bodies after a long morning, and Yuzuru shifts to lean his back against Javi’s side and props both feet up onto the padded seat. Gradually, the cafeteria fills with people as noon approaches. While Yuzuru fiddles with something on his phone, Javi takes the chance to check his texts. It takes no time at all, since Rosa is apparently still unhappy with him for something or other and hasn’t responded to his messages from days ago.

Resigned, he pockets his phone and notices the looks and stares they’re receiving. He feels a bit self-conscious about their hogging an entire table during the lunchtime rush hour without really using it, so he gives Yuzuru a slight nudge, “Yuzu, you want to go get lunch or something?”

“Hmm?” he hums, still tapping away at his phone.

“Lunch,” he repeats. “I’m hungry. Let’s go eat.”

“Oh,” Yuzuru sits up and glances at him. Then promptly looks back down at his phone. “Um, wait, sorry. Mom texting,” he explains. He continues tapping at the screen, frowning, but every once in a while he would steal glimpses of him from the corner of his eye.

“Okay?” he says, confused but patient.

Yuzuru’s eyebrows are almost comically furrowed, and after a few more minutes of increasingly frantic typing he heaves a great sigh and throws his head back, aggrieved. Javi ruffles his flop of hair, gently amused.

“Javi,” Yuzuru says, leaning into his touch.

He turns a little, then starts kneading into the radiating warmth of his scalp. He waits for a few moments for Yuzuru to keep talking, but the silence continues. “Yeah?” he prompts.

“Mm, sorry,” Yuzuru mutters. He lifts his head from Javi’s shoulder and twists to look at him. “Um,” he starts, blinking rapidly a few times. “Can I… can I stay over at your apartment for a few days, after Autumn Classic?”

“What?” he startles, and Yuzuru looks away and picks at the corners of the plastic bag. “I mean,” Javi quickly amends, “yeah, sure, I have a sofa bed you can use, if you want…” but we never even get lunch together, he doesn’t say.

“Mom is going back to Japan for a few days, after,” Yuzuru explains, picking up his bag of ice and wrapping it in a wad of paper towels. He wipes down his ankle, puts on his sock and shoe, and then swings both of his feet off the seat and onto the floor. “Saya got married over the summer. Mom go help them move.”

“Oh, congratulations,” Javi offers automatically, while the rest of him remains blindsided by the bizarreness of Yuzuru voluntarily talking about his family.

“Mom say, ask if I can stay with Javi,” Yuzuru goes on, waving his phone, “because she doesn’t trust me, by myself.” He wrinkles his nose in voiceless protest.

Javi grins helplessly as Yuzuru pouts. “Well, you know,” he says, “mothers know best.”

Yuzuru sticks out his tongue and pokes him in the ribs, but after a moment he says, softly, “Thanks, Javi.”

They don’t end up getting lunch together that day, but later that afternoon Yumi flags him down in the break room and thanks him profusely. He’s never exchanged more than a few words with Yuzuru’s mother before, but he spends a solid ten minutes or so reassuring her that it’s really alright for Yuzuru to stay with him for a few days. He congratulates her on Saya’s marriage, and from her proud, pleased smile he learns where, exactly, Yuzuru got those precise curves of his mouth.

Afterwards, Brian and Yuzuru disappear from TCC for a few days, during which Yuzuru kicks off his season with a clear, if messy, victory at ACI. And then, a few days after that, Javi spends an entire afternoon deep cleaning his apartment. The next morning, Yuzuru shows up to practice with two enormous suitcases, along with his usual small, silver one for his skates. They’re warming up with some stroking exercises when Brian emerges from his office.

Brian takes one look at the giant suitcases lining the hallway and stops in his tracks. “Um, Yuzu,” he calls out, “you going somewhere?”

“To Javi,” Yuzuru chirps, and Javi almost trips at the look Brian gives him.

“Just for a few days,” he clarifies hastily, “while his mom’s back in Japan.”

“Right,” Brian says, “Yumi did mention that,” but his eyes keep flitting back and forth between the two of them.

Javi knows that he worries for them, but he doesn’t quite know what to say to convince their coach that it’s only a matter of four days, that they’ll be just fine. Luckily, Brian seems content to leave it at that, as he doesn’t say any more on the matter and instead refocuses back on the day’s training.

That afternoon, he helps Yuzuru haul one of his giant suitcases out the door, across the parking lot, down the street to the bus stop, onto the bus, off the bus, down two blocks, onto the second bus, off the second bus, down three uphill blocks, over the stairs into his apartment building, up the elevator, and finally into his own apartment.

They’re both panting rather excessively by the time Javi closes his door behind them, and Yuzuru barely manages to toe off his sneakers by the entranceway before he stumbles into the living room and collapses unceremoniously onto the arm of the sofa.

Woken from her nap by their ruckus, Effie meets Yuzuru for the first time while he’s draped over her sofa like a dying noodle. She usually takes a while to get used to strangers, but apparently dying noodly boys are just her type. Javi watches as she sniffs around Yuzuru’s sweaty face for a minute before sitting down in the space between his head and the back of her sofa. She looks up at him, as if pleased with him for bringing back this new addition to her sofa, and her tail swishes happily around Yuzuru’s ear.

Effie’s love at first sight seems to be requited, fortunately. After he’s a bit more recovered from dying, Yuzuru winds his arm around her and starts scratching her cheek. By the time Javi’s got his own shoes off and two glasses of water poured, he finds Yuzuru muttering to Effie in Japanese as if she were a small child, with Effie responding by butting her head against his hand and purring like a motorboat.

“At this rate, Effie’s going to love you more than me before you leave,” he smiles, handing him a glass of water.

“Oh,” Yuzuru scrambles onto his elbows then turns to sit properly on the couch. “Thank you,” he says, reaching for the glass. Dislodged from her spot, Effie hops off the couch and curls into a sunny spot under the window. “ごめんね、エッフィー、” he apologizes, watching her go.

“You know she doesn’t understand Japanese,” Javi says, amused. He sits down next to him on the sofa and gulps his water.

“Cats understand everything,” Yuzuru counters.

He laughs and acquiesces. After resting for a few more minutes, Yuzuru starts unpacking his two giant suitcases. Javi watches from the sofa as Yuzuru pulls out a sleeping pad, an actual cooler of a dozen pre-packed bento boxes, a humidifier, several Ziploc bags of medications and supplements, exercise bands and other equipment, a pillow, and a backpack filled with who-knows-what, not to mention his neatly folded pile of clothes and towels that remain in the suitcases. It seems a bit excessive for a few days’ stay, but, knowing Yuzuru, he’s frankly not surprised.

In the next few hours, Yuzuru finishes setting up the living room to his liking then goes takes a shower, while Javi cooks his own dinner, feeds Effie, and turns on the TV, settling in to watch whatever sitcom that happens to be on. Yuzuru emerges from the shower a handful of minutes later, and after microwaving a bento he joins Javi on the sofa.

Yuzuru’s hair is still a bit damp, but Javi doesn’t mind; he’s warm and smells good, and it’s nice to have him beside him like this. They eat and watch TV, and for all that they’ve never really spent time together like this before, hanging out at his apartment feels just as natural as sharing a rink.

Javi’s doing his best to make up plausible explanations for whatever’s happening in the show when Effie deigns to join them by jumping up next to Yuzuru. He smiles as Yuzuru immediately coos and obediently scratches her chin. “I didn’t know you liked cats so much, I would’ve introduced you two sooner.”

“It’s okay,” says Yuzuru, “we meet now. And I do like them, but cats, not good for asthma.”

“Oh,” he frowns. “I vacuumed and washed the sheets, but if it’s going to be a problem, we could—“

“It’s okay,” Yuzuru reassures. “I know Javi has Effie, so I prepared, brought meds in case. Asthma has been good, recently.”

“If you’re sure…” he trails off, and he wonders why Yumi had wanted him to stay here, if it might’ve been better for Yuzuru to simply stay at home instead.

“Mhmm. Besides,” Yuzuru tilts his head towards him, as if about to share a secret, “I’m thinking, one day, after I retire, I get a cat, too. Name her Axel.”

Because of course he would, Javi thinks, immeasurably fond. “King of all cats, hm?”

“Yes,” Yuzuru beams, like sunshine.

The moment lingers, and the novelty of hearing Yuzuru talk about his future makes something ache inside him. The season’s only just started, but somehow it feels like an ending already. How much longer will they have, from now, to share their lives like this? How much harder would it be, afterwards, to speak with him freely, honestly, and alone?

How easy it would be, right now, to bridge the distance and kiss him on the mouth.


	2. Chapter 2

Backstage at any competition is a whirlwind, and even more so at Worlds.

Without a proper badge, it’d taken Javi almost thirty minutes of smiling at the right people before he’d managed to make his way to the back. With the end of the Men’s short program, most of the skaters in the earlier groups have left, and those from the later groups are now out and about, cooling down and packing up. He spares another few minutes here and there greeting and catching up with a few of them along the way.

Nostalgia washes over him. Every corridor and every room seems familiar, but in truth he’d only competed here that one time, five years ago. Even then, most of the faces are different, now—

But not his.

Yuzuru passes like a specter around the corner of one hallway and into another room, his figure so hidden by the crowd around him that it’s hard for Javi to say that he saw him at all. Still, he finds himself stepping swiftly through the crowd, his pulse rabbit-quick in his neck. He’s lucky Yuzuru’s bodyguards recognize him, for they step aside without argument when he approaches.

The movement catches Yuzuru’s eye, and he looks up from the conversation he’d been having with a woman in a Team Japan jacket.

“Javi,” he says, eyes wide. He’s still in his costume, his team jacket zipped up over it, and he wipes his face with his towel. Then, he turns back to the woman and says something quick in Japanese. She looks between the two of them, then nods, raising two fingers.

Yuzuru gives her short bow, then comes around to pull Javi to an emptier corner of the room. “I have two minutes,” he explains, his hands warm and soft, “then must go to press conference.”

“Oh,” he says, “I don’t—I don’t want to be a bother, I just…”

“You came,” Yuzuru says, his cheeks sweetened by a smile.

“Yeah.” Of course I’d come, he doesn’t say, because he very nearly didn’t. “Of course I’d watch you,” he says instead, for that at the very least is true.

Yuzuru squeezes his arm gently, then pulls away. “I didn’t—” Yuzuru bites his lip and swallows his words, as if ashamed to admit that he might have thought otherwise. “Thank you, for coming,” he decides to say, his media training visibly kicking in. “I’m happy you’re here.”

“Me, too,” says Javi. He takes this moment to look at him, at his eyes and his mouth and all the moving details of his face. Somehow, the longer he does, the less it hurts, and the greater his conviction that this tightrope he’s been walking on will lead him to solid ground.

“I’m—I’m happy to see you,” Yuzuru forges on, more quiet, resolute, and awkward, all at once.

“Me, too,” he says again. Standing before him, fidgety and eyes darting everywhere but to his own, Yuzuru now looks more ill at ease than he’s seen in recent memory, his brave face falling apart faster than he can repair it. A sinister part of him wants to ask if this is what he’d wanted, wants to stay silent and see how much more he can force from those lips. But it’s easy to brush that part aside, because he knows the answer now, seeing him like this.

“I missed you,” he says at last, so Yuzuru doesn’t have to.

Those simple words seem to strike a match, and Yuzuru brightens with a fierce and sudden joy. “I missed you, too,” he declares, as if receiving those words had granted him the courage to voice them in return.

That puts an honest smile on his face, and he reaches for his hand. “You know,” he grins, “second isn’t bad, but I’d wanted to wear your gold tomorrow.” Anything else will have to wait, for the woman is walking towards them.

“You will.” Yuzuru’s eyes are set ablaze, and looking at him now is like looking into the sun.

“I know,” Javi says. He doesn’t turn away.

Yuzuru glances at the woman, then back to him. “Tomorrow,” he promises. Then, he smiles, gives his hand a squeeze, and consents to be lead away.

He stands there in the corner, his hand cold and bereft, and he watches as Yuzuru’s retreating back is once again swallowed by the crowd.

Brian finds him a few minutes later, still standing there.

\----------

When Rosa breaks up with him in November, the first thing he feels is relief.

He’d been back in Madrid for the first time since the end of July, preparing to head out to Pamplona for the first stop of his show, Revolution on Ice. She’d called him to ask if he had time to meet up, briefly. Caught up in the pandemonium leading up to the opening day, he’d said that he couldn’t, there was simply too much that needed to be done in too little time. Maybe at the end of December, when he’s back in Madrid to wrap up Revolution on Ice, or maybe if she’s changed her mind and wants to attend the show after all?

I’m sorry, he’d said.

I’m sorry too, she’d answered, her voice breaking with tears. You’re a good man, Javier, but not for me.

With those words, she ends the call and their relationship.

In the moments after, he stares at his reflection within the blackness of the screen. When he doesn’t feel an immediate sadness, not even after taking a few long breaths, he realizes that he’d changed, somewhere along the way. He hadn’t even noticed, while Rosa had known it weeks ago, or maybe even months before, when he’d first told her he’d wanted to compete again.

He flies to Pamplona the next day, cloudy-minded, and the haze doesn’t lift when he finds himself performing under spotlights for the crowd, nor when he finds himself on a plane yet again.

The reality of their breakup doesn’t fully settle in until he’s backstage for rehearsals in Malaga for the second stop of the show. He’s grabbing some water in the break room when his brain wakes up and suddenly assaults him with its subconscious analysis of recent events: beyond the passing waves of sadness, the first, fleeting thing he’d felt, then, had been relief.

Relief, because a part of him had always lit up at the thought of someone else, warmed at the sight of him, softened to the shape of him. Obliquely, he’d known that this part of him had been there, growing, all these years, but it’s only now that he recognizes it will swallow him whole, one day.

The thought is too fresh and too far for terror to truly set in. Instead, a guilty heaviness follows him onto the rink and back to the hotel, but its shadow lessens with time. That night, he indulges in a long, hot shower, and like steam the revelations of the past days rise and dissipate from his mind. He emerges from the bathroom feeling clear-headed for the first time in weeks.

He’s rummaging through his suitcase for a clean shirt when he notices a text alert from Brian. It’s not unusual for Brian to text him now and again, especially when he’s spending so much time on a different continent, so he doesn’t think much of it at first.

He’s pulling on passably-clean shirt when his phone rings again, and he unlocks it to find Brian asking him to please call Yuzuru sometime tonight, if possible. It takes a minute for the strangeness of the request to register, but when it does it hits him like a truck: Yuzuru and Brian are at Rostelecom Cup right now.

Fear is his first reaction.

He immediately video calls Yuzuru through Line. The Men’s Short Program competition should have finished about a few hours ago, he estimates, if he remembers correctly. He’s itching to check the short program results and pull up protocols, but he’s afraid to exit out of the app while it’s dialing.

It connects.

“Javi?” Both video and audio are a bit choppy, but Yuzuru looks to be in his hotel room without any bandages or crutches in sight.

“Hey,” he breathes, relieved.

“What’s wrong?” Yuzuru frowns, leaning towards the camera. “You sound…”

“Nothing,” he says, and it’s true. “I just… Are you okay?”

Yuzuru huffs out a laugh and leans back in his chair. “Brian tell you to talk to me?” he asks, but he’s smiling this time.

“Yes,” Javi confesses readily, “but I’ve no idea why.”

“Oh?” he says slyly. “Can you guess?”

“Um,” he stammers, wrong-footed. He’d been expecting to console a despondent, re-injured Yuzuru, and while he’s glad that’s not the case it leaves him woefully unprepared to deal with whatever’s actually happening here.

He takes a closer look at Yuzuru through the screen, and the pieces start to fall together after he takes note of the slightly manic edge to Yuzuru’s smile. “Wait. Wait, hold up.” He sits down by the side table and perches his phone against the hotel tissue holder. “That’s the look you always have when you want to do something Brian doesn’t want you to do.”

“Yeah?” Yuzuru prompts, obviously enjoying being a torment.                                               

“Yeah,” he nods. “But you’re literally in the middle a Grand Prix, for god’s sake, what do you want to do that Brian doesn’t want you to do?”

“What does Brian never want me to do?” Yuzuru laments with a dramatic roll of his eyes.

Javi blinks. “Oh my god.”

“Oh, yes,” Yuzuru says, his smile turning vicious.

“Oh my god,” he repeats, trying to wrap his mind around the extent of Yuzuru’s self-destructive insanity. “Oh, shit. Yuzu. Are you serious?”

Yuzuru’s eyes gleam like the devil when he nods, “Yes.”

“Quad Axel?” he hisses. No wonder Brian had wanted him to call. “Yuzuru.”

“Javier,” he returns smoothly, jaw set in stone.

He’s not about to parrot Yuzuru’s name back at him again, but he’s run out of things to say. “Fuck,” he swears instead, with feeling.

Yuzuru stares at him for a beat, then a giggle bubbles out from his throat. “Javi,” he takes a breath, “you won’t tell me ‘no’?”

“I mean, of course I want to,” he admits, “and I still think you’re ten kinds of crazy, but this is your skating. If you really, really, _really_ thought about it, and you still want to do it and you still think that now is the best time for it, then who am I to tell you ‘no’?” Besides, he knows that telling Yuzuru not to do something basically guarantees that he’ll do it. “But that’s just me. I mean, Brian probably had a lot to say about it, most of it along the lines of ‘no,’ I’d imagine.”

“Mhmm,” Yuzuru hums, apparently placated by the thought that there’s at least one person in his life who’s insane enough to go along with his own insanity.

“But what brought this on, why now?” he asks. “I’d thought you were waiting for next season.”

Yuzuru groans and buries his head into his arms. “Popped Sal, no combo.”

“Wait, what?” Yuzuru’s 4S had been more or less stable all season, and usually he’s quick enough to tag on a 3T to a 2S. “Wait, okay, I’m going to pull up the protocols.” He grabs his laptop and leans his phone against its screen.

“No,” Yuzuru moans, visibly shriveling up on the inside from all the _kuyashii_. “Don’t look, is embarrassing.”

He laughs, waiting for the ISU page to load. “Hate to break it to you, Yuzu, but your fancy not-combo was probably streamed live by thousands of people around the world and has now been recorded and uploaded for all of posterity.”

Yuzuru makes another dying whale noise and proceeds to melt off the hotel table in shame. He smiles at the sight, unbearably fond, and he can feel his heart thudding loudly in his chest.

“Javi is laughing at me,” puddle-Yuzuru accuses.

“Hey,” he says lightly, looking back to his laptop screen to find Yuzuru’s protocol, “I know all about popping Sals, so excuse me if—” he finds it, third on the list. “Oh. 1S? Not even a double toe at the end?”

Yuzuru is mulishly silent for a moment. “…caught an edge. Slide on my butt.”

“Oh my god,” he says, struggling with the immediate urge to search for the video. He supposes it’s understandable, in Yuzuru-terms, how making history with a 4A is the only way to redeem himself from a single-Salchow butt-slide.

“Javi,” Yuzuru whines, but his mouth curves into a real smile.

“At least your loop and Axel both looked good,” he remarks, looking at the rows of +3’s, 4’s, and even 5’s for the Axel. “And Level 4 step sequence!”

“Of course Level 4!” Yuzuru exclaims, appalled. “Javi, two-time Olympic Champion cannot have Level 3 step sequence. And he cannot single his quad Sal and slide on his butt in competition!”

“Oh Yuzu,” he says. “You know that you will always be a two-time Olympic Champion. Nothing can take that away from you, not even sliding on your butt in competition.”

“I know, I know,” Yuzuru sighs and tilts his head back to stare up at the ceiling. “It’s just,” he slumps back down at the camera, “I’m so, so angry, I can’t…” he waves his hands around, chasing words.

“I know,” he says, “I’m sorry. But for what it’s worth, I know you can win even without the quad Axel. It’s your choice, of course, but going clean is great revenge, too.” Yuzuru is silent for a while, so Javi adds, “Besides, you’ve already got your first Grand Prix silver already in Finland, so you’re safe from the curse here.”

Yuzuru scrunches his nose at that. “Thanks for the reminder, Javi.”

He looks frankly adorable when he’s pouting, and Javi wishes he could reach through the screen and smooth the wrinkles from between his eyes.

“But, thank you for calling,” Yuzuru finishes.

“Of course,” he says. “Anytime, Yuzu.”

Before ending the call, Yuzuru perks up. “I’ll see you in Toronto, after?”

“Yeah,” he nods, and it’s gratifying to see the hope in his eyes. “The show’s tomorrow, but I’ll be flying back in two days.”

“Okay,” Yuzuru grins, satisfied. “Good luck with show, tomorrow.”

He laughs. “And good luck to you, too.”

After Yuzuru waves him goodbye, Javi doesn’t hesitate to hunt down a video of the competition. He watches Yuzuru skate on his screen, prepare for his combo, slip on his takeoff into the Salchow, fall, and then slide about a meter down the rink before getting up with the most hilariously bewildered expression. That night, he goes to sleep hiding a smile, the clip of Yuzuru’s infamous butt-slide playing in a loop in his mind.

The next day, at rehearsal, he grins at the text he receives from Brian: _Thanks_ , gold medal emoji.

\----------

Now that the news of his attendance has made the rounds, it becomes readily apparent that his beard and glasses are no longer enough to disguise him in the crowd. His standing in line for the Men’s Free Skate has since become something of a meet-and-greet, and for the next few hours he takes selfies, signs brochures, and makes small-talk with this weird, secondary line of people that has attached itself to the main line for entering the arena.

Last night, Brian had offered to cover him so that he could watch from backstage, but he’d declined in favor of watching live from the stands again. Talking with these people isn’t so bad, even if it is a bit exhausting, and he’s had enough of watching Yuzuru skate from a screen. Even if his seat isn’t the best, watching Yuzuru skate live is a luxury of retirement, and he’s damn well going to take it.

But maybe next time, he’ll needle Brian for a staff pass, and then he’ll be able to watch by the boards and jump up and down with him and Ghislain every time Yuzuru lands something, or doesn’t.

He tries to hide his wayward chuckle behind his hand as he leans over to sign yet another brochure, on Yuzuru’s page.

It’s funny, he thinks, how quickly futures can come and go. They can be as fleeting as a passing thought, if they’re not caught in time, and they can wither away like a branch along the main road, glanced at but unwalked. How was he supposed to know which ones he was supposed to take? How was he supposed to know which way he was supposed to go? The line between the possible and impossible ebbs and flows with the tide of his emotions, he knows, but he still doesn’t quite understand where it lies now.

The woman closes the booklet and thanks him for his signature, and he barely remembers himself in time to give her a smile. He looks up over the line and is surprised to find that they’re almost at the bag check tables. He’s close enough that he can even see through the glass doors of the front entrance. Pocketing his pen, he waves apologies to the stragglers hoping for some last-minute pictures and autographs.

He glances up at the looming pillars extending from the roof of the arena and down at their clock-like shadows. Everything’s felt so rushed, these past few days. He knows he was right to come, but he just needs a little more time to untangle his thoughts.

He thinks back to when he saw Yuzuru yesterday, brave like a lone warrior both on and off the ice, and something about it saddens him. He doesn’t want them to be yet another thing Yuzuru must fight for in the way he does for everything else he has. He understands why Yuzuru might not think so, but to him not everything worthwhile must be fought or suffered for. To him, they shouldn’t have to be like that, with every happiness like a battle won, every moment just an eye in the surrounding storm. To him, they’re a simply choice for the both of them to make.

He thinks back to the shores of his childhood, and he knows this to be true: Sometimes, the greatest things in life come simply, like the light of the sun and the blue of the sea.

He wants to bring him there, sometime. He wants to find him, wants to ask him, wants to talk with him about all these things.

But first, he will watch him skate.

\----------

The season proceeds with Yuzuru securing his fifth Grand Prix Final title, his victory so decisive that the gold medal might as well have had his name engraved on it by design.

Javi hadn’t gone, of course. Instead, as he did last season, he’d settled in on the sofa of his living room and streamed the competition live on his laptop. It’d felt different, though. By habit, he’d analyzed each of the skaters’ performances, but this time there’s no build-up for him towards something greater, like the Olympics or even Worlds, and it reminds him again of how far removed he’s become already, even after twelve years on the senior scene. It’s a hard pill to swallow, sometimes, but it’ll pass one day, he knows.

After the free skate concludes and the final standings confirmed, he releases a breath, lumbers up from the sofa, stretches, and takes a bathroom break. He splashes some water onto his face to help keep the late-night sleepiness away. Despite whatever personal hang-ups he may or may not have, watching Yuzuru and the others compete will always be thrilling and bordering on terrifying; but, now that the competition is over, the building exhaustion of having to stay up multiple nights in a row while still training during the day is slowly creeping in.

Effie joins him when he returns to the sofa, and the two of them sit in the same places where he and Yuzuru had eaten dinner and watched TV, more than two months ago now. He scratches at Effie’s chin and runs a hand down from her head to her tail. He watches quietly as the stream shows the ongoing preparations for the victory ceremony, eyelids growing heavier by the minute.

He blinks awake when Effie places a paw on his knee, and he sees that Yuzuru had returned to the rinkside, jumping up and down behind the boards. The camera obediently zooms in on his face, and Effie’s tail flicks happily by his side. She misses him, he knows.

“También lo echo de menos,” he confides, patting her rump. Effie doesn’t take her eyes off the screen, but he feels that she understands.

He smiles when they announce his name, and he watches contentedly as Yuzuru skates out and takes his bows. It’s odd and vaguely surreal to be here on this sofa, to be thinking back to those days, to be remembering the smell of his shampoo and the warmth of his shower-clean skin, and to be watching him wave from atop the podium in Vancouver, all at once.

The Japanese anthem plays, solemn and slow. His body moves through a yawn, and his eyelids drift closed for a while. It takes almost superhuman strength to open them again, and when he does he finds the medalists untangling themselves from posing for photos.

He blinks through the blue light of Yuzuru’s victory lap on his screen, and for a long moment it feels as if he’s watching the ending scene of an old, familiar movie.

After Yuzuru leaves the rink and disappears from view, he closes his laptop, bids Effie goodnight, and finally drags his body to bed.

He wakes up the next morning submerged in a strange melancholy. He goes through the motions of his morning routine, but instead of pulling on day clothes and heading into the kitchen for breakfast he climbs back into his still-warm bed and sighs. Luckily, today’s his day off, and besides making time for a trip to the gym sometime in the next 24 hours he has nowhere he really needs to be.

Time passes. He has no idea if only a few minutes or more than a few hours, but he’s pulled from his stupor by the strident, relentless ringing of his phone. He flops his hand around his bedside table until he finds it, then answers without looking, “Yeah?”

“Javi?” It’s Yuzuru.

He rolls over and squints at his phone, only to realize that it’s a video call. “Shit,” he mutters, knowing he must look like a complete mess. “Uh, hey, Yuzu. Sorry,” he manages through a yawn as his body apparently hates him today, “just woke up.”

“Just woke up?” Yuzuru repeats, eyebrows furrowed. “Javi, is like, one o’clock for you.”

“Mhmm,” he agrees, unconcerned. “Oh, wait, you’re still in Vancouver?”

“Yes, fly back today.” Yuzuru flips the camera and shows him the suitcases lying on the floor of his hotel room. He flips the camera back. “Done packing, feeling bored, so call Javi,” he says, grinning cheekily.

He huffs a laugh. “Of course, anytime.” He turns onto his stomach and props his phone on top of his pillow and against the headboard. “Congrats on winning the Final, Yuzu. Fifth time, yeah? Damn, that’s gotta be another record.”

“Yes,” Yuzuru smirks, pulling a fluffy hotel pillow from somewhere off-screen and hugging it to his chest. “I’m just happy I win even though it’s in Canada.”

“Oh my god,” he says, because of course Yuzuru would care about that. “Well, I guess the power of Grand Prix Final gold is stronger than your Canadian silver curse, huh?”

Yuzuru nods happily.

“But we all know what’d happen if you ever go to Four Continents in Canada,” he teases, wanting to rile him up a bit.

“Hey!” Yuzuru squawks, too affronted to find the proper words in English for his discontent. “You’re so bad, Javi,” he pouts instead, and Javi can tell he wants nothing more than to punch him in the shoulder, if he could.

He smiles in response. “Show me your medal?” and Yuzuru scrambles away from the table to somewhere off-camera, narrating this and that about various backstage shenanigans all the while.

A few minutes later, Yuzuru returns with a sock. “Tadaa!” he exclaims, slipping the shiny medal out of the sock-sack and brandishing it close to the camera. “Can you see?”

“Yuzu, it’s too close,” Javi says to the dark blur. Yuzuru moves it back a few inches, and the camera finally focuses on the smooth, shiny curves of the medal. “Oh, yeah, this year’s is nice. It’s pretty.”

“Well,” says Yuzuru, turning to examine the medal dangling from his hand, “usually they’re quite nice. Only sometimes, not as nice,” and Javi knows exactly which one he’s talking about.

“Says you,” he rebukes lightly. “Better to have a cheap, ugly one that to not have one at all.”

Yuzuru grins at him, unrepentant. “I’d let you wear, if you were here. Oh, wait,” he leans forward and places the ribbon around the phone, the medal lying flat on the table. He sits back and frowns. “You can’t tell, but I tried. Best I can do, for now.”

“Why, thank you,” he says, hopelessly fond. Just yesterday, Yuzuru had seemed so far away, but seeing him like this now makes him feel as if he could reach through the screen to ruffle his hair or rest his palm against his cheek. “Will I see you before Wednesday?” he asks. He’s scheduled to leave for Spanish Nationals in a few days, and somehow it bothers him that they might not be able to see each other before he goes.

“I’ll be back on Monday,” Yuzuru replies. “You leave for Nationals on Wednesday?”

“Yeah,” he says, and from his bed even the thought of flying to Spain is tiring.

“Javi, don’t worry,” he reassures, endearingly earnest. “I’ll see you on Monday, and on Tuesday. I’ll bring my medal, and you can wear it for luck.” He pauses. “Not that you’ll need it for Nationals, but you know what I mean.”

“Okay,” he says, smiling. And then, because he can’t resist poking at him again, “After I win, you’ll know that it’s really lucky, and then you can wear it again before your own Nationals, too.”

Yuzuru wrinkles his nose at him. “When did Javi get so mean?” he demands, stuffing the medal back into its sock. “No medal for Javi, no luck for Javi. Hope you bring back silver,” he says, as if silver is the very worst of all curses.

Although for Yuzuru it probably is, Javi thinks as he hides his laughter in his arms. “Sorry,” he says, trying to sound suitably apologetic. He knows that despite Yuzuru’s victory at the Grand Prix Final, a part of him must be feeling a bit unsettled about the incoming storm at Japanese Nationals: his first appearance in three seasons, a rematch against Shoma, and the debut of Daisuke Takahashi, of all people, back to the national stage. “You’re right, that was mean, I’m sorry.”

“You’re still laughing,” Yuzuru observes pointedly.

“Yuzu,” he says, exhaling the last of his laughter. “No matter what else happens at Japanese Nationals, I know you’re going to win, just like how you know I’m going to win mine.”

“It’s not the same,” Yuzuru argues. “You’d never lost to Raya.”

“Excuse you,” he counters. “I had.”

“What?” Yuzuru startles, offense forgotten.

“Yeah,” Javi says, “back in 2010.”

“Wow,” he mutters, as if reevaluating everything he knows about the two Javiers. “Well,” he says, focusing back to Javi, “I’m not… worried, not like that. I know I am the best, and that I can win. It’s just…” he frowns, tapping at his chin, “I know Shoma is growing, getting better, and now Daisuke is back, too. It’s all good, I’m happy for them, and I’m happy I won here, but it’s just, I need to grow, too. Sometimes, I feel like I’m not.”

“You are,” he affirms, without question, “you will.”

“How do you know?” Yuzuru presses.

“Same as I know the sun will rise in the morning,” he says, purposefully dramatic but equally honest.

“Oh my god.” Yuzuru face-plants into his pillow.

“It’s in your nature,” Javi continues. “There’s no other way for you, like—”

“Stop, stop, I got it,” he complains. “You’re making my face red.”

Javi laughs, loud and open, and he knows that they will both bring back gold. “Lucky or not, I want to wear your all golds. From here, from Nationals, and from Worlds. Okay?”

“Greedy,” Yuzuru chides, as if he hadn’t been the one hoarding most of the gold from the past half-decade, but when he peers up from behind his pillow he looks wickedly pleased.

Javi hadn’t kissed him, then, when they’d sat on his couch and talked about their imagined futures, and for a long while afterwards he was sure that he never would. He hadn’t kissed him when they’d met again after Rostelecom Cup, but every time he saw him both in and out the rink he’d wondered whether he would.

He still hasn’t kissed him, but now he knows he wants to.

Now he knows he would.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can I just say, thank you so much for reading! I especially adore all your comments <3
> 
> I started writing this story just as a way to deal with my own feels, but sharing it with you and reading about your own thoughts has been really wonderful. So wonderful, in fact, that it made me churn out this second chapter much more quickly than I'd expected, and the chapter count has now also been bumped up to 4!
> 
> I do have a little more time to write this week, so I'm hoping Chapter 3 will be out soon-ish. Things will be getting more hectic for me afterwards, though, so I can't make any promises regarding timeline except that I'll be doing my best. 
> 
> Thanks again for reading, and please do feel free to drop a comment, if you'd like :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a reminder that all competitive participation, programs, and results are made up by yours truly (along with basically everything else that happens, but you know what I mean :).

The arena vaults above and around them all, encapsulating the audience and the skaters into a singular, insulated world.

He’s squished in his plastic seat like a sardine, but somehow Javi feels safe here, tucked within a crowd that understands what it means when he holds a Pooh bear in his lap. He doesn’t need to explain himself to anyone, and if he pretends that his Japanese comprehension is functionally nonexistent, which isn’t hard at all given that it’s closer to the truth than otherwise, he doesn’t need to do anything but periodically smile, wave, and give shallow bows to whoever notices and wants to say hello.

It’s a perfectly symbiotic coexistence: he gets to watch the Men’s free skate in relative peace, and his neighbors get to make guest appearances with him on the jumbotron after certain skaters, like Jason and Boyang.

The group of middle-aged women in the row in front of him seem to appreciate it the most. During the last Zamboni break, they’d turned around and showed him their handmade banners for Shoma. He’d ooh-ed and ah-ed accordingly, and he must admit to have been impressed by their handiwork, no matter that he’d found it a bit strange to have been greeted by an embroidered Shoma. Then, while eyeing the Pooh plush on his lap, the lady sitting directly in front of him pulled out another Shoma banner from her bag and playfully offered it to him.

He still doesn’t know if she’d only been joking, but he’d taken it nonetheless, to a burst of amused giggles from the women.

What the hell, he thinks as the final flight makes their way to the ice for their six-minute warm-up, there’s no reason why he can’t wave both a Pooh for Yuzuru and a banner for Shoma. Just watch him. Plus, a part of him is gleefully awaiting the look on Yuzuru’s face when he sees him on the jumbotron with a handmade Shoma banner. It’s not a particularly smart or well-advised part of him, for sure, but Yuzuru should already know that it’s there for good.

Besides, Yuzuru’s skating second to last, before Shoma, so whatever psychological effects it may have on him shouldn’t affect his skating. And Shoma might actually appreciate his support, who knows. They did have a moment by the boards at the Olympics, after all.

He’s reminded again how fun it can be to simply be a fan of skating rather than a competitive skater himself, and it’s helpful to have props and banners and fellow spectators there to distract from the impending nerves, too.

He’s not quite hyperventilating when Yuzuru and the others exit the ice for Nathan’s turn, but he’s definitely well on his way after Yuzuru re-enters the rink for his skate, almost 30 minutes later.

His nerves must be radiating absolutely everywhere, because the lady who had let him borrow the Shoma banner turns around after Yuzuru’s name is announced and gives him two thumbs up in moral support. He appreciates it, he really does, and he has no idea how Brian manages to keep his own head each time he sends one of them out into the rink.

The music starts.

Yuzuru’s body is an elegant line against the stark white of the ice, and the strength and clarity of his presence resounds throughout the entire arena. With every movement, he looks as if he’s weaving an entire world out there, a place of just his own. While the rest of them can watch, he’s since gone to a place where they can never truly follow.

There’s a certain distance that’s crafted into the lulls and swells of sound. It’s maintained even as every element assumes its own place within the musical architecture, but rather than separating him from the audience something about its energy beckons them to him instead. It dares them to lean in, to look and listen closer, to discover just how far they will go for him.

When Yuzuru goes into his final spin, it feels as if the entire arena is holding its breath, only to let it go after he stops in his ending pose. For a few precious minutes, they had become a living, breathing thing together, but the beast fades away when the music ends and Yuzuru cracks a smile, bending in a bow. The crowd rises to its feet, and the four sides of the arena ring with screams at his every turn.

Yuzuru on the ice is undeniable, today and always.

Javi doesn’t realize he’s still clutching his Pooh and the banner to his chest until the lady in front of him turns around, wiping the wetness from her eyes, and pats him firmly on the knee. A laugh escapes him, and he bops the back of her hand with his Pooh. She smiles, then gives him another two thumbs up before turning back around to wait for Yuzuru’s scores.

Thank goodness for her, he thinks, and then he looks down to the rink and finds Yuzuru leaning against the boards, putting his skate guards on. Brian and Tracy are hovering beside him, and even from this distance Javi can tell that they’re both quietly ecstatic by his performance.

He wants to be there, Javi realizes. Not in the rink himself, necessarily, but by the boards. He wants to be with him at the start and at the end, to sit beside him in the Kiss and Cry, to hum along to his national anthem, to see him shine with gold around his neck.

It’s a greedy thought, he knows, but he thinks it’s of a kind that Yuzuru would appreciate and might reciprocate in turn.

He’s busy squinting down at Yuzuru in the Kiss and Cry when the crowd around him bursts into cheers and laughter. He looks up to the jumbotron with a smile already on his face, and he joins in with the laughter when he sees himself clutching his Pooh and the Shoma banner together like a string of pearls while Yuzuru takes off into his 4S+3T combo in the second half. He finds it hilarious that Shoma’s name and embroidered face were so clearly visible, and it gets even better when his own anxious expression doesn’t change at all, not even after Yuzuru nails the combo and flows out of it like water.

Yuzuru’s pointing at the screen and chattering animatedly with Brian when the camera cuts back to the Kiss and Cry. When he sees his own face, Yuzuru stands and bows and waves happily with his own Pooh. Then, he circles his hands into binoculars over his eyes and looks around, as if searching for someone in the crowd.

Javi knows that it’s practically impossible for Yuzuru to find him this high up in the stands, but he appreciates the gesture nonetheless. Then, Yuzuru lifts the corners of his yellow towel like a banner, and then he pulls a face and wags his finger. Javi bursts into the most undignified of giggles along with the ladies in the row in front of him, and they give each other a flurry of self-satisfied thumbs ups.

He’s glad he’s here.

The thought blooms from his chest, and he’s suddenly grateful for every step he’d taken to get here, no matter how painful or circuitous the path.

He might have been a little late, but he’s here now, and Yuzuru is, too.

We’ll be alright, he thinks, just as the arena erupts with cheers.

\----------

After New Year’s, he returns from Madrid to Toronto to resume preparing for Europeans.

Yuzuru’s not set to fly back from Japan until a week later, but somehow he still finds himself looking for him at the rink, in the cafeteria, in any crowd of faces. It’s driving him insane, honestly, and he knows Brian can tell from the way he watches him during practices. He’s only glad that Brian hasn’t asked him why, probably chalking it up as some sort of residual holiday-end blues, and he hopes the restlessness will subside once Yuzuru returns.

The last time he saw him, during the two days after Yuzuru had returned from the Grand Prix Final and before Javi had left for Spanish Nationals, they’d barely had the chance to even say hello, and since then he’s been trapped in a whirlpool of his own feelings, swirling around and around, deeper and deeper. Luckily, he’d been able to win Nationals and perform well in the final stop of Revolution on Ice despite having half his head in the clouds, but he knows that Europeans will be another story altogether.

He counts down the days until Yuzuru’s arrival, and when Yuzuru finally, finally returns to TCC Javi knows he’s there before his eyes find him by the rinkside. The sight of him punches him in the stomach, and he’s skating towards him before Brian can say another word. His arms wrap around him a moment later. Without his skates on, Yuzuru can comfortably bury his face into Javi’s chest, and they stand wrapped up in each other until Brian follows and drags Javi back to practice.

Yuzuru’s laughter echoes around the rink, and even as Brian scolds him Javi wishes this moment could last forever.

Despite the snow and the January freeze, the following weeks pass with the same sweetness of spring. While Javi’s ramping up to peak at Euros, Yuzuru trains at a lower intensity to rebuild from his post-Nationals break and to aim towards Worlds, more than two months away. And so, much of their training schedules don’t align as well as they had before the Grand Prix series, but they still find themselves sharing the ice several times a week for stroking practice, at the very least.

He’d come back from the Olympics primarily for his seventh Europeans title, but the weight of his goal doesn’t feel so heavy when he’s complaining about this or that over lunch with Yuzuru, or sharing a secret hot chocolate with him on a frigid day, or showing him pictures of Effie while they wait for his mom to come pick him up.

Time seems to slip like sand through his fingers. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be ready for these days to be over, but without any more competitions in his horizon he knows it’s only a matter of time before he and Yuzuru will be sharing their last training session together.

And sure enough, he wakes up one day with a flight to Minsk the following afternoon, and a familiar melancholy follows him out of bed and to the rink.

Yuzuru must have noticed, for his eyes keep following him around the rink, and after their morning practice he’s the one who sneaks them a hot chocolate, for once. They have lunch sitting side by side in a booth inside the cafeteria, Yuzuru with his homemade bento and Javi with a Cobb salad from the café, and they talk about everything and anything besides Javi’s impending departure.

“Javi,” says Yuzuru, scooting closer so their legs can touch beneath the table, “have more photos of Effie?”

“No,” he replies. She’ll be leaving with him tomorrow, too, he doesn’t say. There’s a growing heaviness in his throat, and even with a sip of hot chocolate he can’t swallow it down.

Yuzuru stares at him a little longer, then blinks and says, quietly, “Oh, um, that’s okay.”

He can feel it when Yuzuru starts swinging his feet to release some inner tension, and something about it makes him reach over and place a hand on the top of his thigh. Yuzuru stops moving at the touch.

“Do you, um,” Javi hesitates, suddenly feeling as if he’s in over his head, “do you want to have dinner together, later? We could, uh, order takeout or something at my place, so Effie can be there, too.”

He doesn’t know what brand of insanity had taken over him, but he feels better now that the words are out of his mouth, no matter that Yuzuru will most likely turn him down. He sneaks a glance at him, and… Yuzuru looks a bit worryingly shell-shocked, if he’s being honest.

“It’s okay,” he backtracks, taking back his hand to clean up the leftovers of his lunch, “I’ll just—I can just send you pictures of her, whenever you want, you don’t—”

“Javi,” Yuzuru interrupts, and he’s smiling now, “we can do that. I’d like to.”

“Oh,” he says, stunned, “okay, uh, great. Let’s do that, then.”

Yuzuru pulls out his phone and calls his mom, presumably updating her on his new dinner plans. Their conversation is brief, which he takes as a good sign, and Yuzuru gives him a thumbs up after hanging up. “Mom say okay,” he confirms.

“Oh, good,” he says, and it’s like he can finally breathe again.

“You have afternoon session, with Brian?” Yuzuru asks.

Javi nods. “Yeah, last one before—um, before I head out for Euros.”

“Okay,” Yuzuru says. “I study a little, then go to gym. I meet you at the rink, when you’re done?”

“Sounds good,” he agrees, and he still can’t believe this is happening.

They part ways, and then a few hours later, while he’s still in the middle of his one-on-one with Brian, his coach stops in the middle of a sentence to say, “Why’s Yuzu still here?

“What?” he pants, looking around the rinkside but not seeing Yuzuru anywhere.

“In the lounge,” directs Brian, pointing at a place behind the glass wall.

“Oh,” he says, finally spotting him reading something behind the window. He rubs at his nose, feeling pleased but strangely shy. “Um, we’re getting dinner together, after practice.”

“You’re getting dinner together, after practice?” Brian echoes, eyebrows raised. Yuzuru seems to have noticed them, somehow, and he perks up and gives them a jaunty wave.

“Yeah, well,” he says absently, raising a hand, “we’ve been getting lunch together sometimes, too.”

“Right,” Brian says, “I’ve been hearing about that as well.”

He shrugs, not quite knowing how to respond to that.

“Just—” Brian sighs and looks him in the eye, expression serious. “Javi, just… just be careful, alright?”

“Um,” he hesitates, uncertain as to why Brian seems so concerned all of a sudden. “Oh!” he says, remembering his untimely bout of food poisoning before Cup of China last season, “don’t worry, we’re getting takeout. Healthy takeout. I’m not going to let him cook, Brian.”

Brian stares at him blankly for a few moments, then seems to deflate with a long sigh. “Right,” he says, rubbing at his forehead. “Healthy takeout. And don’t let Yuzu cook, please.”

“I won’t,” Javi promises, and that’s as much as they say about that.

Yuzuru’s waiting for him by the rinkside, bouncing on his toes, when he and Brian finish their session.

“Javi!” he beams, impatient for a hug as if he’d been waiting for weeks and not mere hours.

He skates over and pulls him in obligingly. “Hey, you,” he says, and luckily Yuzuru doesn’t seem to mind his post-practice sweatiness as he happily buries his face into his chest.

They pull apart after a few moments so that Javi can change out of his skates and workout gear, and afterwards they head out together with his gym bag swung over his shoulder and Yuzuru’s skating suitcase toddling along the bumpy sidewalk behind them. The journey to his apartment is a thousand times less exhausting without having to haul two giant suitcases along the way, and by the time Javi unlocks his door the giddy energy that’d been bubbling up since after lunch is no less diminished.

“Effie!” The moment he toes off his sneakers, Yuzuru shuffles over to the sofa and kneels on the floor to greet his most beloved feline, and Effie responds by enthusiastically rubbing her head into the palms of her most favorite noodly boy.

Although unceremoniously abandoned on the doorstep of his own apartment, Javi doesn’t particularly mind. He steps out of his own shoes and pulls out a few takeout menus from a kitchen drawer, then joins Yuzuru and Effie on the sofa.

They spend a good hour arguing over what to order and from where, as apparently Yuzuru has yet to be introduced to the wonders of takeout. After a brief scuffle of a tickle fight, which Yuzuru wins simply because Javi refuses to stoop so low as to actually fight over takeout, they settle on a Japanese place that Yuzuru claims his mom often goes to.

“But the point is to try new things,” Javi argues halfheartedly, already dialing the restaurant’s number.

“It’s new for you!” Yuzuru exclaims, “even if you have competition in few days.”

“But not for you,” he retorts, “and you don’t have anything until Worlds. Which is in, like, two months.”

“I want the oyako-don,” Yuzuru barrels on, undeterred.

“Have you ever been to that Thai place—Oh hi, yes, I’d like to order for delivery, please.” He rolls his eyes as Yuzuru grins at him. “Yeah. The, uh,” he squints at where Yuzuru’s pointing on the menu, “oyako-don? And…” he hasn’t even looked at the menu for himself yet, “actually, make that two, please.”

He rattles off his address, gives a quick thanks, then hangs up. “Happy now?” he asks as Yuzuru laughs.

“Yes,” he answers decisively. “Javi will like their oyako-don. Javi-stomach will, too.”

“Okay, Yuzu,” he says, and there’s nothing left to do but smile at his stubborn earnestness.

Javi turns on the TV, logs into the unofficial Team Orser Netflix account, and shows Yuzuru how to browse through it so that he can pick something more interesting than old sitcom reruns for them to watch after their food arrives. He then goes to take a quick shower, and he’s pulling on an old pair of sweats when the doorbell rings.

“Javi!” Yuzuru calls from the living room, audibly scrambling around. “Javi, where’s wallet? I forgot I not have money!”

“Oh shit,” he reacts, his hair dripping water on everything as he flips through this morning’s pile of clothes. “Wait, wait I found it!” he shouts back, pulling his wallet out of a jacket pocket. “Catch!” He cracks opens the bathroom door and tosses the wallet blindly down the hall.

Yuzuru yelps, and his wallet thumps soundly on the ground. “Sorry!”

He only laughs and starts toweling his hair. He emerges from the bathroom a few minutes later to the tantalizing aroma of grilled chicken and eggs. “Oh wow, that smells good,” he says, finding their dinner laid out neatly on the low table between the sofa and TV.

“Came with miso soup, too!” Yuzuru points excitedly. “And salad,” he adds, but neither of them are quite as impressed by that.

They settle in on the sofa, and Effie winds between their legs a few times before hopping up to curl beside Yuzuru, who grabs the remote and unpauses the video. It takes Javi a few minutes to realize that what he’s watching isn’t some weird, super long ad for sustainable seafood but is, in fact, the beginning of a nature documentary.

“Um, what is this?” he asks around a mouthful of sweet egg and rice, because of course Yuzuru would pick something educational to watch over dinner.

“Is called, uh, _Planet Earth_ ,” explains Yuzuru. “I saw picture of baby whale, so must be good.”

Or maybe it’s just because Yuzuru’s weak for baby animals, he amends, because of course he is. While he’s not as invested in the on-screen animals as a certain someone, he finds great entertainment in watching Yuzuru react to the unfolding aquatic drama. Yuzuru coos at the baby humpback, sits in rapt attention as a pod of dolphins hunt for fish, shouts as if he’s at a football game when a penguin manages to slip away from the fur seal, and slowly exhales when the shark attacks and the polar seal disappears, blood blooming in the water.

He’s finished with his food about halfway through the documentary, but when he looks over after the end credits start rolling he sees that Yuzuru’s bowl is still half full. “You okay?” he asks, concerned that Yuzuru might honestly be upset about the seal.

“Oh, yeah,” Yuzuru answers lightly. He pets Effie with his free hand. “I don’t eat much at night, can save for later.”

“Okay,” he says, but to him Yuzuru still looks strangely morose. He reaches for the remote and exits from Netflix to YouTube. “Here,” he says as he struggles to type with the remote, “do you know Maru, the cat? He’s Japanese.”

“Oh my god,” Yuzuru replies, finally smiling. “Javi, I don’t have time to know internet cats, even Japanese ones.” He puts his bowl and chopsticks back on the table so Effie can crawl into his lap.

“Great, you’ll love him,” he says, certain.

Yuzuru does, to exactly no one’s surprise, and they succumb to the time-bending powers of cat videos until Yuzuru’s phone buzzes in his pocket, startling them both to the reality that it’s now almost midnight. Yuzuru hastily answers his phone, and despite not understanding Japanese Javi knows that it must be his mother on the other end of the line.

He’s already composing an internal apology to Yumi for the next time sees her, whenever that might be, but luckily their conversation doesn’t seem very strained, nor does Yuzuru sound too distressed despite his guilty and apologetic expression. After a few minutes, Yuzuru presses his phone to his shoulder and turns to him.

“Um,” he starts, his cheeks dusty pink. “Mom say, too late to drive, ask if I can stay? She pick me up tomorrow, early. But I know Javi has flight, so if not—”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Javi spills out all at once. “You’re welcome to stay the night, my flight’s in the afternoon anyway, it’s okay. Sorry, Yumi!” he says a little louder, hoping she can hear.

Yuzuru relays the message, says a few more things, and then ends the call with another apology and a goodnight. They stare at each other for a long moment, still in disbelief at how quickly the night had gone by. Suddenly, Yuzuru bursts into a fit of giggles, looking like a gleeful schoolboy who’d gotten away with mischief, and soon they’re both wheezing with laughter.

“Sorry,” Javi manages, “I didn’t mean to keep you so late with Internet cats.”

“No, no,” Yuzuru replies, rubbing at his eyes, “sorry I bother you again.”

“It’s no bother,” he reassures. “Oh, but wait,” he thinks back to the giant suitcases Yuzuru had brought last time, “you brought so much stuff last time, is there anything you need—”

“Oh, um,” Yuzuru looks around the room, considering. “I have some things, in skating suitcase, but… maybe sleeping clothes, and toothbrush?”

“Okay,” Javi agrees readily.

They spend the next few minutes clearing and cleaning up the table, and afterwards he tells Yuzuru where to find a toothbrush in the bathroom. Then, he goes into the bedroom to pull some clothes he thinks might fit, albeit loosely. The faucet’s running when he returns outside the bathroom door, but he doesn’t know what else to do so he stands outside and waits. Effie stares at him from her spot on the sofa, and he sticks out his tongue at the judgement in her eyes.

A minute later, the water stops, and Javi quickly knocks on the door. “Yuzu? I brought some clothes…”

The door opens. “Thanks, Javi,” he says, face clean and damp. “You use bathroom, I change in your room?”

“Yeah, sure,” he replies smoothly, although a part of his brain is stuck on the fact that Yuzuru’s going to be changing in his bedroom.

But apparently this is his life, now, and when he emerges from the bathroom to find Yuzuru wearing his clothes and murmuring softly to Effie, he’s struck by how much he wants this, how much he wants to keep this.

“Hey,” he says, and Yuzuru looks up at him and smiles. The sight of him steals away whatever words he might have said, so he just stares at him dumbly from the hallway.

After a moment, Yuzuru asks, “Javi going to sleep now?”

It’s only then that he realizes the sofa bed still isn’t made up, and that Yuzuru doesn’t have a pillow or a blanket or even a clean sheet. “Shit, the sofa bed. Sorry, I completely forgot. Here, let me—” He stops, and a wild thought springs into his mind. “Um…”

He’s quiet for so long that even Effie turns from Yuzuru’s head scratches to stare at him. He knows he’s in trouble when he can’t even look at his own cat in the eyes.

“Do you,” he tries again, looking at Effie’s flickering tail, “I mean, my bed’s a Queen, we could share, if you want. If you don’t mind, that is.”

Yuzuru blinks at him. Then, inexplicably, he turns back to Effie and starts speaking to her in Japanese.

“Um…” he curses at himself for overstepping, “or I could just—”

“I say,” Yuzuru interrupts, “that Effie’s owner is a silly man.”

“I know, I’m sorry—”

“Sometimes he thinks too much,” Yuzuru continues, scratching her cheeks and under her chin, “but sometimes not enough. What do I do, Effie?”

Javi doesn’t know if Yuzuru’s talking to him, to himself, or to his cat, but something about the words, or maybe just the way he says them, cracks the glass future he’d been harboring in his heart. Like in the moment after the fairytale chime of midnight, reality descends and reminds him of his flight to Minsk tomorrow, and from there to Madrid. Even Effie will be leaving, and he doesn’t have a return flight to Toronto, nor a flight to Saitama, not even a ticket to Worlds.

They’re not necessarily difficult things to obtain, for him, but the fact that he hadn’t spared a single thought about these things until now shows him how little he’s actually done to prepare for his own life after Europeans, much less how theirs might fit together. He’s done nothing for their future but desire it, and by now he knows that that’s not how things work.

For a moment, for all that they’re in the same room, it feels as if the distance between them stretches as far as the sun from the sea.

But then, Yuzuru kisses Effie on the top of her head, stands up, and walks towards the bedroom, and there’s nothing Javi can do but follow him inside. There, they climb into bed, careful and chaste, and Javi turns off the lamp on the bedside table after they settle.

There’s something surreal about lying in bed with someone at night: two souls cocooned together from the world, but only in the fragile hour before sleep sinks in. Javi lies on his back, staring into the starless ceiling, and his mind is pulsing and blank. They’re not touching, but if he turns he knows he will find the shape of him in the dark.

He wonders if that would be enough.

It’s not.

The answer comes too easily, and he sits up, unspeakably frustrated.

The bed shifts, and he doesn’t need to look to know that Yuzuru is watching him. They’re close enough that he can feel the imagined heat of his skin, and he doesn’t want to just imagine it, anymore.

How easy it would be, he’d thought back then, to kiss him on the mouth, but somehow the intervening months had turned it into an impossible thing. Now, he can only lean in halfway and hope that Yuzuru will meet him in the darkness.

He waits.

He waits, but Yuzuru doesn’t.

It hurts. Of course it hurts, but that’s the nature of hope, he understands. No matter how he might feel, or how long he might have hoped, it’d never been the right time, and now isn’t right, either.

He sits back, and the chill down his arm reminds him just how quickly something imagined can disappear. Maybe they will be like that too, one day, and the thought buries itself like a sword through his chest. Before he can lie down and turn away, the bed moves again, and Yuzuru swings a leg over his hip and sits on him with all his weight.

They’ve never done anything like this before, but it feels right, somehow, even though Javi knows he’s hurting, too.

Yuzuru leans forward, crowding them against the headboard, and tucks his face into the crook of Javi’s neck. Like a cat, he burrows his forehead into the softness he finds there, and Javi can’t help but wrap his arms around him to hold him closer. His hands instinctively find their way home: one rubs at Yuzuru’s scalp through his thick mess of hair, and the other maps the heated curves of his ribs to his hip.

Hot air rushes back and forth against his skin, making the fine hairs of his arms stand up, and soon enough Javi feels a slow bloom of wetness seeping through the thin cotton of his shirt.

Then, the quiet tremble of the body in his arms.

“Shh,” he soothes, “it’s okay,” but Yuzuru has long learned to be soundless with his tears.

They hadn’t talked about it, but they both know that he’s going to retire after Europeans, and with retirement he’ll leave Toronto and return to Spain. He’s always known that this day would come, had even looked forward to it at one point, but the inevitability of it all wounds him now.

But perhaps it’s better like this, he thinks. Better to shatter that glass future now than in a year, or five, or ten, when one day he’ll find that there’s nothing left to wait for, anymore.

Tears subsided, Yuzuru sits back and rubs at his eyes, sniffling. Javi grabs a tissue for him from the bedside table, and after taking it Yuzuru blows his nose, hard. The sudden noise startles a laugh from him, and in retaliation Yuzuru slaps him gently on the arm.

“Hey,” Javi protests, laughing still.

Yuzuru grunts but doesn’t look at him, then stretches his hand out for another tissue. He fetches one, and he watches as Yuzuru wipes his eyes and cheeks and tosses the used tissues into the bedside bin.

“You okay?” he asks, no matter that he’s the one who’d just been rejected.

“Mhmm,” Yuzuru hums, then sniffs again.

He finds himself smiling honestly, even after everything. “Come here, you,” he says, and Yuzuru thumps his forehead onto his shoulder.

Yuzuru lifts his head almost immediately. “Oh no, that’s gross side,” he complains, then thumps his forehead back down onto Javi’s other shoulder, the one dry of tears and possible snot.

“Oh my god,” Javi says, unspeakably fond.

Yuzuru tries to muffle his answering laughter, but Javi can feel his warm puffs of air, regardless. Maybe Yuzuru doesn’t feel the same way, not yet, but he must feel something for him too, and that must count for something. Maybe this will be enough, he thinks. He hopes beyond all hope that it will be true, that they can continue to have this, at least.

“We’ll be alright,” he murmurs into his hair, then hides a kiss there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...and here we are. I'm hoping to get the last chapter out within the next week or so, but real life is knocking on the door so I can't make any promises :( But yes, the chapter count for this story will be staying at 4 (even though it's looking to be a long one)!
> 
> Until then :)


	4. Chapter 4

While the organizers begin preparing the rink for the victory ceremony, Javi carefully extricates himself from his spot within the sardine can of seats and picks his way slowly through the crowd to the restrooms. The line for the ladies room stretches to somewhere beyond reckoning, while the one for the men is merely terrifying, which is just about as he’d expected. It’s a bit of a struggle, making small talk and maintaining a pleasant expression on his face while his bladder ticks like a time bomb, but he manages, somehow.

He makes it back inside just in time. The lights dim a few minutes after he settles down into his seat, and the space sinks into a wash of dreamlike blues. Music pours its way in, too, and then the ceremony begins.

As the flower boys and girls take their places beside the podium, he tries to squint through the darkness to see if he can find Yuzuru waiting by the boards. It’s a bit of a tall order from where he’s sitting, but soon he makes out what looks to be a Yuzuru-shaped blob swaying by the gate, possibly chatting with a Shoma-shaped blur, and he can’t help but smile at the memory of the Pooh bear and Shoma banner he’d been waving together not too long ago.

The ladies in the row in front of him are there, too, but they seem to be approaching the victory ceremony with a more formal bearing, for their flags and banners have all been carefully folded and stowed away. He considers following suit and putting his Pooh back into his backpack, but in the end he decides against it and settles the plush squarely on his lap.

It’s silly, he knows, but he thinks Yuzuru would like the sight of them together, if he somehow finds them in the crowd.

The announcer begins to call out the medalists, and when Yuzuru is introduced as their champion the screams of the audience grows so loud that for a few seconds all that can be heard is their roar. He can’t hear himself at all, among it all, but from the tremble of his throat he can feel that his voice is getting hoarse. Still, he regrets nothing, and even though his hands and throat will probably hate him tomorrow he continues to cheer and clap as Yuzuru hops onto the podium and smiles at the crowd, resplendent under the lights.

He belongs there, is all Javi can think, and it’s easy to believe so when they’re not both fighting for the same place on the same podium.

He watches as Yuzuru bows his head for his gold medal, then again for his bouquet, and yet again to clasp hands with some ISU official, and he finds himself absently wondering what the flowers smell like this time, if Yuzuru will tell him about it afterwards, if maybe he’ll let him sniff at it later.

Then, booming from the speakers: _“Please rise for the national anthem of the champion.”_

This is his favorite part.

The crowd rises to their feet, and as the music fills the arena people’s voices begin to join in, too. He doesn’t know the words, but the melody is lovely to his ears. He’s heard Yuzuru sing it a few times, whenever they’d shared the podium with Yuzuru as the victor, and he wonders if Yuzuru will teach him the words one day so that he can sing along next time, too.

He doesn’t sit down after the anthem ends, nor when the photographers take their time photographing the medalists. When they’re finally done, he can’t help but jump a little himself when Yuzuru hops off the podium and starts taking his victory laps around the rink.

The sight of him approaching, joyous and free on the ice, makes Javi throw his head back and shout, “¡Vamos, Yuzu!”

Something must have reached him, whether his voice or his words, for Yuzuru perks up and turns around, skating backwards for a few strokes. He makes binocular eyes at his section of the crowd, and although Javi knows he can’t see him he waves back with his Pooh, whooping in the crowded darkness like a proud, love-struck fool.

\----------

February in Madrid passes slowly, Javi learns; March, even more so.

When he’d first returned to Spain as the seven-time European Champion, he had gladly ridden the ensuing wave of interviews, media appearances, and other events that had come with victory until they had carried him all the way into mid-February. Yuzuru had texted him congratulations the night after the free skate, and he had responded with a thank you in return, but they hadn’t talked any more than that. Being busy had been easier than the alternative of pining over his phone, if he’s being honest.

Then, after he’d run out of things to do, he’d spent the next few days at home, sunk deep into the family sofa, with Effie as his accusing witness. By the end of the month, he had caught up with all four seasons of the latest telenovela series and had learned to swiftly shield his eyes from his own multivitamin commercials that liked to occasionally assault him between episodes. On the plus side, he’d become more up to date on current Spanish pop culture than even Laura, for once, which seemed to annoy her to no end.

Eventually, the calendar turns, and he greets the new month with the blind, fervent hope that it will somehow bring him something new. He’d thought that maybe he just misses skating, or misses his old social life, so he goes out for drinks with his sister and her friends, accompanies his dad to the old haunts of their hometown, and cooks dinner with his mom for his family. He visits the few ice rinks in the city, but they’re all so crowded that he decides not to skate after all; instead, he poses for a thousand pictures, signs endless papers and photographs, and talks to the young skaters and their parents.

Through it all, it seems as if his days are passing by the hour. Nothing he does seems to be making a scratch on the stifling blankness he feels, and he thinks of how all the time he’d spent at home and on vacations had felt entirely different when he knew how and when, exactly, it would end. With this slow, peaceful existence, he feels as if he’s forever on the brink, waiting for something, or for someone, no matter that he’s supposed to have the entire rest of his life, now.

He lasts for less than two weeks before he snaps and goes out for a long, evening jog. As the kilometers pass steadily beneath his feet, he wonders if there’s something wrong with him, to be feeling stifled in a beautiful city that he loves. He wonders if he still knows what he wants, whether this new chapter of his life requires a different setting and new characters as he’d thought it would, or if the story demands that it is he who must change, instead.

These thoughts cling to him over dinner, into the shower, and into bed with him that night. He can’t shake it even as he tosses and turns, and in defeat he reaches over and switches on the lamp on his bedside table. Its warm, yellow light floods the darkness from his room. With a sigh, he rolls onto his back and grabs for his phone.

The corners of his social media and messaging apps are dotted with red. He hasn’t been avoiding his friends, per se, but ever since returning from Europeans he’s found himself skirting around any news on how the rest of the season’s been unfolding. With almost all of his friends involved the sport in some way, it simply came with the territory. Now, having reached the end of an intangible rope, he sits up against his headboard and settles in for a long night.

His backlog of messages, unsurprisingly, has since built up to an almost intimidating degree. It gets easier after he starts, though. He eases in by first scrolling through his Instagram, liking other people’s posts and skipping over the comments. Then, he catches up with his Snapchat and responds to the typical antics he finds there with a few silly faces of his own.

In his private messages, he confirms with the Shibs that he’s indeed alive; their messages, primarily from Alex, had been growing increasingly, comically concerned by his lack of response. He forgets that, unlike for himself, it’s not an ungodly hour in the morning wherever the Shibs are, so he’s surprised to receive a jubilant response almost immediately. The resulting conversation sprawls familiarly and aimlessly over a good chunk of time, and he feels decidedly lighter after it runs its course.

Buoyed, he starts digging through the pile of messages that had followed after Europeans. Through it all, he feels more than a bit ashamed to be only getting around to them weeks after the fact. Even so, while the Spanish messages are understandably left unread for the moment, the English ones are met with unaccusing grace and uncomplicated happiness. He bites back a smile as he replies to those, too.

Much later, he exits back to his home screen and absently flips through his pages of apps. Near the end, his eyes fall on a bright green icon, pointedly free of notifications. There’s only really one person he talks to through Line, and the silence there gnaws at him. He’d tried several times to message something to him, but he’d never known quite what to say. He’d gotten used to their open bantering and periodic video calls over the course of the season, and the bite of regret he feels at their sudden absence makes him wonder if he’d been wrong to stay here, after all.

He’d thought that he could just be his friend, if that’s what Yuzuru had wanted from him, but it hurts to recognize that even friendship might be too big a word for what they’ll have in a few more months like this, much less years down the line. While they hadn’t talked as much before, when they were still competing against each other, at least they’d been tied together by all those things they’d shared. Now, what will they have but their past and perhaps a few shows in the summer?

A more meaningful future with him seems impossible to imagine from his childhood bedroom in Spain, but it’s true when they say that hope is the last to die. On some nights, like this one, it’ll remind him of that night and whisper like the devil in his ear: _but he must feel something, too._

His thumb hovers.

Two motionless minutes later, the timed blackout of his screen decides for him. He exhales, hesitant, but he reasons that any potential conversations are better saved for when he’s more sensibly awake, in any case.

Mollified by the logic, he plugs his phone back in, turns off the light, and curls on his side beneath the covers, missing the shape of him in the dark.

The next day, he wakes up late in the morning. His legs are nostalgically sore from yesterday’s run, and his head hurts a little from staying up so late one his phone last night. He has nowhere he needs to be and nothing he needs to do, but what he used to think of as freedom now feels empty instead. Blinking through the morning sunlight, he stays in bed and reorients himself by replying to a few more messages before rolling out of bed.

When he finally makes his way down to the kitchen, he finds both Laura and his parents already there. It’s odd, he thinks, because it’s Friday. Usually, on weekdays his sister is off to work early in the morning, and his parents normally spend the day in town, not at home. He moves slowly down the hall, and his unease grows with each step. The moment he rounds the corner, their eyes snap to him with foreboding unison, and for some reason he thinks back to that seal on the ice, surrounded by sharks.

“What,” he asks warily, pleasantries forgotten.

His mom and dad turn back to the stove and newspaper with an entirely unconvincing façade of nonchalance, while Laura responds by marching forward and thrusting a folded sheaf of paper into his chest like a dagger. “Here,” she says, rather superfluously.

He raises an eyebrow but gamely plucks the pages carefully from her fingers and unfolds them.

It takes a few seconds before the printed words sink in: it’s a ticket to Worlds.

“You’re welcome,” she grins, satisfied by his stunned silence.

He swallows, now acutely awake. “How…” he starts, then trails off. Worlds will be in Saitama this year, just a few days away. Tickets must have been sold out seconds after they were released nearly a year ago, and while it would have been possible for him to procure one a few months ago, coming by one now is like stumbling upon a diamond on the street. It feels just as unreal to find one in his hands.

“Trust me when I say it wasn’t easy,” Laura says, dropping down onto a stool behind the kitchen island. He mirrors her in a daze, sliding onto the stool beside her. He flips from the all-event ticket to the following pages of event schedules and pauses on the boarding pass for a flight from Madrid to Haneda. Behind that, on the last page, is a hotel reservation.

“Or cheap,” she adds, glancing over. “Happy birthday until you’re, like, 40.”

A thousand questions rush through his head, but they’re all too blurred to articulate. “Thank you,” he manages at last, even though the words don’t feel nearly enough.

His mom takes that moment to slide a plate of toast and two fried eggs under his nose. “Laura had planned everything months ago,” she says, placing a fork on the counter. “We’d wanted to surprise you with it after Euros, but, well, first you were so busy, and then even after things had calmed down, you seemed…” she waves a hand in the air, searching for words, “I don’t know, sad, somehow, and for a while we weren’t sure if you even wanted to go. I thought that maybe you just needed a break from all the skating. ”

“But obviously,” Laura quips, “he was sad because he secretly wanted to go but didn’t have the sense to figure out how to get there.” Her words are razor-sharp with the truth, as always.

“And so,” his dad adds, as if rehearsed, “it took a bit of discussion, but in the end we all agreed that this seems to be the best option.”

“What?” His confusion is muted by his mouthful of eggs.

“Your flight’s tomorrow,” says Laura. “We’re telling you now so that you can’t psych yourself out. So go pack, take your moping face with you, and don’t come back until you’ve figured your shit out, okay.”

“Laura,” their mom chides, but she doesn’t disagree.

Even dazed as he is by the sudden turn of events, he can see their concern and earnestness as clear as daylight. They hadn’t known what’d been wrong with him, recently, and he hadn’t known what to say even if they’d asked. They’d worried all the same, and it sounds as if they’d guessed halfway to the truth. In any case, he knows he won’t find what he’s looking for here, and perhaps Laura is right, and he shouldn’t come back until he does.

Like a compass for a sailor lost at sea, the papers in his hands are unequivocal in their direction, and for the first time since coming home he knows exactly where he needs to go.

“Okay,” he says.

The next morning, Laura drives him to the airport. She ignores him when he asks why she’s driving in the wrong direction, and he contents himself to silence until she pulls into the parking lot of the Disney store and tells him to hurry up after she parks.

“Um, what?” he asks, frozen in his seat.

“Go on,” she says, shooing him with a hand.

When he doesn’t move, she sits back in her seat and sighs at him like their grandmother. “Javier,” she says. “You’re retiring, not dying from a terminal illness.”

“Um,” he says, because what else does somebody say to that.

“I know you probably do miss skating, at least a little,” she barrels on, “but no one hovers over their phone for skating, or spends hours composing then deleting texts to skating, okay.”

He did no such thing, but, “How—”

“I’m not blind,” she says, exasperated, “I know what pining looks like.”

Apparently Laura’s somehow become clairvoyant over the years, but what the hell. By now he knows he needs all the help he can get. He clears his throat, and looks down at his hands in his lap. “But what if he—I mean, what if they don’t feel the same way?”

“Javi,” she says, looking at him as if he were a darling but dumb child, “that poor boy has been in love with you for years.”

That’s certainly news to him, if it’s true. Which it’s not, because then why didn’t he kiss me back, he barely refrains from asking.

Laura continues, “If he said anything along the lines of, ‘oh, let’s just be friends,’ or—wait, knowing you, you guys probably didn’t even talk about it at all—so, if it was _somehow decided_ that you guys should just be friends, then… honestly, Javi,” she sighs. “You’ve been home for months without any plans of going back. You didn’t even have a ticket to Worlds. What else was he supposed to do?”

Ask me to stay, he thinks instinctively. But, even before he finishes the thought, he knows that that’s something Yuzuru would never ask of him, if he thought that this was what he’d wanted.

“Shit,” he realizes. She’s right, as she always is, and hope exults in the empty chamber of his heart: _he must feel something, too._

“There’s no reason why it can’t work out,” she concludes, “unless you don’t even try, which is exactly what you were doing. But no brother of mine is going to walk away from love so easily, do you hear, so go in there, buy a Pooh bear, and then come back. Quickly, so you won’t miss your flight.”

He opens his mouth with another question, but she undoes his seatbelt, reaches over to open his door, and pushes him out of her car. “Hurry up!” she calls after him, then slams the door shut.

So he jogs away from the car and into the store, the question of love churning unanswered between his ears. Even then, it doesn’t take him long to find it: a round, fuzzy Pooh plush the size of someone’s head. It’s cute, it’s squishable, and it tells him to hurry up and buy it, so he does. He squishes it inside his backpack after paying, and when he’s back in the car he finds himself smiling like a fool. He still can’t quite believe that this is happening.

“Shut up,” he says when he sees Laura grinning at him.

“Boys,” she sighs, shaking her head, and she turns the car back onto the road.

\----------

It’d taken Javi perhaps only 15 minutes or so to make it all the way backstage after the victory ceremony, but he has a much harder time finding Yuzuru this time around. The media is always much more intense after the conclusion of a competition, and with his victory at Worlds Yuzuru won’t be getting out of it all for another two hours or so, at the very least.

Still, he entertains himself by catching up with some of the older skaters and getting to know some of the younger ones, and a several media outlets even ask for a few words from him, too. He doesn’t think it’ll ever stop being a bit odd, hearing _and now, with Olympic bronze medalist and two-time World Champion Javier Fernandez_ , but he won’t deny that it has more than a nice ring to it. It’s also comforting to be reminded that his achievements are here to stay, and there’s nothing more he has to prove to anyone, in terms of his skating.

It helps him see where he might fit within this new landscape of figure skating, and he likes what he’s seen over the past few days. Talking with Brian yesterday after the short program had been productive, too, in crystallizing a path for him from competitive skater to coach, and the transition doesn’t seem so distant or daunting, anymore.

He’s ready to take that step, now.

He doesn’t do anything as dumb as blurting out his retirement in someone’s Snapchat story, but he does make a mental note to ask his manager to prepare an official statement for release, probably for sometime around World Team Trophy, ideally. If he plays his cards right, he thinks with secret delight, maybe they’ll invite him as a guest skater for the gala there, and he can bid his farewells with Yuzuru right beside him on the ice. Maybe he’ll even get Yuzuru to be the one to give him the retirement bouquet, and afterwards they can complain about how the flowers smell, and then over breakfast the next day they can hand them out piece by piece to the other skaters, too.

The daydream swirls around pleasantly in his head until he’s pulled out of it by the commotion of a large group rounding the corner of the hallway.

He knows it’s Yuzuru by the stray antenna of hair he can see flopping around over the other heads in the crowd, but he doesn’t actually see his face until the crowd disperses halfway down the corridor. Yuzuru’s changed back into his track pants with his Team Japan jacket zipped up on top, and he bows multiple times to multiple people before disentangling himself from them at last. He emerges with only a few familiar faces beside him and his small silver suitcase bopping along behind.

“Javi!” he calls out, the smile illuminating his face like daybreak.

“Hey, you,” he says, walking into a hug. “Congratulations.”

Cameras swiftly turn on them, and the flutter of camera shutters punctuate the air, but Yuzuru doesn’t seem to mind. He whispers a quiet _thank you_ in his ear and only lets go after rubbing a few circles on his back. Afterwards, Yuzuru grabs his hand and starts swinging their arms together, and they continue down along the hallway as if they were two children at a park.

“Did you eat dinner yet?” Yuzuru asks after they’ve been escorted into a guarded van.

“Um, no,” he replies, because his original dinner plans were interrupted the moment he stepped inside this van, but he hadn’t been about ask something as mundane as _where are we going_ while Yuzuru was leading him by the hand.

From the front passenger seat, Yumi turns around and says something to Yuzuru in Japanese, soft and smooth. Yuzuru nods along, untangling their fingers to brush at his hair, then turns back to him. “Mom say, we can buy something on the way to hotel. Pay you back for the oyako-don,” he grins.

“Oh, no,” he waves. “That was nothing, please—“

“Can’t say no to Mom, Javi,” Yuzuru says, wagging his finger. “Not polite.”

It’s not as if there’s anything he can really do about it, as he’s currently in their van, after all, and he finds that he doesn’t want to deny himself this, if they’re offering. “Alright, then,” he shrugs, and it’s as easy as that.

There are no windows by the backseat of the van, so it’s hard to gauge for how long and how far they’ve been on the road. But whether ten minutes or an hour, it probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference to them, because they readily fill the space with endless words, as if all their months of not talking has built up an overflow of thoughts and stories that are only now allowed to be released.

He tells Yuzuru of what it was like, watching the competition, of the woman who had lent him her Shoma banner and who had cried after his free skate. He tells him of Laura driving him to the Disney store on the way to the airport, of how he knew he needed to buy that specific Pooh even though he knows Yuzuru must have had half of all the Poohs in the world, at some point. He tells him of Effie, of how she’s not exactly of fan of his home in Madrid because there are no safe spots under windows where she can nap, of how she’s picky with Spanish cat food and seems to prefer the Canadian brand.

He listens as Yuzuru tells him of his training over the past two months, of how Brian’s been complaining about losing hair over him training the 4A, of how Tracy finally took pity and bought a new coffee machine for TCC but mostly for Brian. Did it help? he asks. Brian’s just losing hair with more energy, Yuzuru says, and they can’t stop laughing even after their bellies start to hurt.

Their van must have stopped for food at some point, but he doesn’t realize it until the door next to him slides open and he finds their driver there with a bag of takeout in his hand. He scrambles to balance the bag on his lap, and afterwards he finds that he can’t laugh without something spilling out of the sides of one of the boxes. Naturally, it only makes Yuzuru try even harder, and he starts telling him laundry list of dumb jokes that Javi knows aren’t funny but make him laugh nonetheless.

In retaliation, he makes Yuzuru carry the bag after they arrive outside the back door of the hotel, and he has a much better time laughing as Yuzuru struggles to balance the load all the way up what seems like a hundred flight of stairs while Yumi scolds him playfully every time he swears.

When they finally arrive at their floor, Yumi pats her son on the back and says a few long sentences in Japanese, then carefully extricates a box from the bag before walking back down the stairs.

“Oh, is she not eating with us?” Javi asks, opening the door into the hallway.

“Um, no,” Yuzuru answers, looking a bit flushed from all the exertion. “She say, she stay with Dad and Saya, Javi stay with me. Pay you back for using sofa bed.”

“Oh,” he says, surprised. Dinner is one thing, but staying the night and kicking Yuzuru’s mom out of their hotel room while he has his own is another entirely. “No, really, she doesn’t have to, I have—”

“Can’t say no to Mom, Javi,” Yuzuru smiles, just a little quirk of his lips. Then, he pauses and blinks at him. “Unless you don’t want?”

“Of course I do,” he backpedals, “but—” He meets his gaze, and Yuzuru doesn’t look particularly bothered by the change in sleeping arrangements. “Well,” he shrugs. If it’s okay with them, it’s okay with him. “Alright, then.”

They stop in front of the door at the very end of the hallway, and Yuzuru bumps him with his hip. “Card key.”

He obediently fishes the key out of Yuzuru’s pocket and swipes them in.

The door opens to a fairly average, nondescript room with two twin beds. Yuzuru walks in first and sets their takeout on the table in front of the curtained window, and Javi follows, pulling Yuzuru’s small silver suitcase to stand beside its familiar giant counterpart. He sets his own backpack on the ground next to the table, then sinks down into one of the chairs.

“Ah,” he sighs, “this is nice.” He looks over at Yuzuru who’s now wrestling his enormous suitcase open. “Aren’t you exhausted? I didn’t even skate today, and I’m exhausted.”

Yuzuru rolls his eyes, collecting a bundle of clothes. “I’m more gross than tired, need shower.”

“The food’s going to get cold,” he warns. But when he lifts the bento boxes from the bag, they’re still warm to the touch.

“Javi can eat first,” he calls out from the bathroom. “I be quick.”

“Okay, then,” he says, but he knows Yuzuru probably didn’t hear him over the sound of running water.

He spends the next few minutes puzzling out how to turn on the TV. After it flickers to life, he ends up flipping through the ten available channels before he realizes that there’s nothing on that he can understand. Eventually, he settles on a loud, colorful variety show featuring people he doesn’t recognize attempting challenges he can’t comprehend. This is worse than nature documentaries, he despairs. Even the deliciousness of the unagi rice can’t make it any better.

Fortunately, Yuzuru is true to his word and quick to get out of the shower, and he joins him by the table not 15 minutes later.

“What is this?” Yuzuru asks, scowling into his rice. “And you said my nature video was bad!”

“It wasn’t bad, it’s just, you had all of Netflix to choose from!” he defends. “I have, like, ten channels. So you don’t know what’s going on, either?”

“Variety shows,” Yuzuru sniffs. “Too much yelling, and running around.”

“Hey, I’ve been in a few, too.” he points out.

“But it’s funny when Javi do it,” he argues. “Other people, just look dumb. Like me, if I did it.”

That’s really flattering, actually. “Well, thanks,” Javi says. “But for what it’s worth, I think you’d be great in one, too.”

“Nope,” Yuzuru says. He leans over to grab the remote. “You won’t see me in variety show, but maybe you see me on the news.”

“Oh my god,” he says, because it’s probably true.

Yuzuru takes a few seconds to flip through all ten channels, then sighs a little when he finds that the evening news is covering some construction project in the area, not figure skating.

“That’s okay,” Javi says. “We’ll probably see you tomorrow morning on five different channels anyway.”

Yuzuru snickers a little, but he seems appeased by that.

They end up going back to the variety show because it turns out Yuzuru has a lot of opinions he wants to share about the on-screen shenanigans, and Javi find more entertainment in his commentary than in the show itself. While Yuzuru’s busy talking, Javi reaches over from time to time and snags some of his unagi, until Yuzuru gets fed up and just hands him his bento box entirely.

It works out well, in the end. Between the two of them, they manage to both decode the rules of the game on the variety show and finish all the food that they’d brought up with them, save for a serving of salad which they succeed in squeezing into the mini fridge.

After clicking off the TV, Yuzuru lets out a roar of a yawn, and Javi doesn’t bother hiding his laugh even as Yuzuru scowls at him.

“Go to sleep,” Javi says, reaching out to rub gently at his nape. “You still have the gala tomorrow, too.”

Yuzuru doesn’t lean into his touch, but he lets his head loll forward so that Javi can more easily massage at the tightness there. “I don’t want to sleep,” he mutters.

“Why not?” he asks, because he knows Yuzuru tends to crash hard after competitions, and it’s frankly quite surprising that he’s still awake.

But Yuzuru doesn’t answer.

He waits for a few long moments to see if Yuzuru might change his mind, and he can’t help but smile a little at the persistent silence. Instead, he brings in his other hand so that he can properly work at Yuzuru’s shoulders. “A few more minutes,” Javi decides, “then let’s both go to sleep, hm?”

Yuzuru breathes in. “Okay,” he says, more sigh than sound.

Much more than a few minutes later, Javi finally releases him with a firm pat on the back. Yuzuru stands up and stretches luxuriously, jaw stretching around a wide yawn, and he meets his eyes with a small smile.

They take turns using the bathroom as they get ready for bed, and even the elephant in the room doesn’t impede them from navigating the spaces around each other with the same ease with which they share a rink or any other room.

Javi’s curled up beneath the sheets, listening to the sounds of Yuzuru brushing his teeth, when he lets himself wonder: why does everything else come so easily except for asking him _do you want this, too?_

Maybe it’s a hard question for anyone and for any relationship, but it’s frustrating because he knows his own answer, and by now he thinks he knows Yuzuru’s too. And yet.

It’s difficult, still.

Similar questions must be swirling in Yuzuru’s mind, because when he steps out of the bathroom and turns off the lights, he doesn’t move toward the other bed and only stands there, watching him through the dark.

It’s as if something switches for them in the darkness, as if it opens the only door through which they can meet somewhere in the middle. He’s not sure if he should step through it now, or wait to see what comes for him from the other side.

“You okay?” he asks, watching him too.

Yuzuru lets go of the breath he’d been holding, then walks around to sit on the long side of his bed, facing Javi. “I miss Effie,” he says, instead of lying down.

“She misses you too,” he smiles. “I’ll show you some pictures of her in the morning.”

“And did you?” Yuzuru presses, face carefully blank.

Oh, so they’re talking about this now, he realizes with a jolt. “I did,” he says. And then, because he feels the need to repay Yuzuru’s courage with honesty, he adds, “Every day.”

He scoots back a little in his bed and lifts a corner of the blanket. Yuzuru sniffs a little, then grabs a pillow from the other bed and climbs in. They don’t bother with keeping a careful distance, this time around. Yuzuru burrows his head into the crook of his neck, and he pulls at the sheets and drapes them around them both. They breathe together in the darkness, like they did all those months ago, and the distance between then and now seems small and unreachable, all at once.

“Why you come?” Yuzuru’s voice rumbles against his collarbone.

Like this, cocooned together beneath the blankets in a warm, womb-like darkness, Javi feels emboldened by a rare, quiet peace. He presses his lips to the crown of Yuzuru’s head. The familiar scent of skin and soap wafts around him, and he finds that even the elephant of truth does not seem so terrifying anymore.

“Javi?” Yuzuru says again, his fingers tightening their hold on his shirt.

“I’m sorry,” he says, finally. Yuzuru stills against his chest. “I should’ve come back after Euros.”

Yuzuru shifts away just far enough so that he can look him in the eyes. “So why you come now,” he asks, “if not then?”

He meets his gaze and smiles at the familiar fire he sees there, and he lifts a hand to card Yuzuru’s wild hair behind his ear. “I knew you must’ve felt something, too,” he says, “but I was afraid that you didn’t feel the same, at least not yet." The confession washes away all his remaining dusts of doubt, and it’s easier to continue, now that he’s started. “I thought I could be your friend until then, but I realized that I could wait for a year, or five, or ten, and instead of loving me back, one day I’d find that we weren’t even friends, anymore.”

His hand moves with a mind of its own, brushing the tears from Yuzuru’s cheek, then cupping the curve of his neck. “I couldn’t do it. Do you understand?”

Yuzuru sits up and shakes his head blindly, rubbing at his own face. “But I was waiting, too,” he fights.

Javi follows him up, and the blanket pools around them. “I know,” he says, reaching for him. Yuzuru moves forward, but instead of meeting him in the middle he pushes Javi back down onto the bed and climbs over him.

“I was waiting, too,” he says again, this time with true anger flaring through his words. “But you were leaving. And you didn’t come back.”

“I know,” Javi reassures, placing his palms over the hands planted above his shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

Yuzuru looks down at where their fingers meet, then back at him, his eyes narrowed, red-rimmed, and unconvinced.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. “We should’ve talked about this, about us, a long time ago. I should’ve come back so that we could have. I’m sorry you had to wait so long, for me.”

After a moment, Yuzuru sits back into the cradle of Javi’s hips and brings their hands to his stomach. “I thought, maybe, you wanted other things more,” he mumbles. “I thought, maybe, what I had been waiting for, already happened, already over.” He untangles one hand to wipe at the tears escaping down his cheeks. “Javi, skating is still first, but, you say, if we wait together, it’s okay?”

“Yeah,” Javi promises. “Together, anything is okay.”

“What if I want to skate another season?” he asks.

“Only one? That’s too easy,” he teases.

“What if—” Yuzuru hiccups between his words, “—what if I skate until Beijing?”

“Then I’ll wait for you to hang that third gold medal around my neck,” Javi grins.

That manages to punch out a laugh through his tears, and Yuzuru leans down to cover Javi’s body with his own, chest to chest, cheek to cheek. “And what if I want the one after that, too?” he pushes, sniffling loudly.

“Oh, well,” he pretends to think, “my neck might get pretty sore with a fourth gold, but I guess that’s okay.” The grip on his shoulder tightens.

“Just like that?” Yuzuru mutters, small and hopeful.

“Just like that,” says Javi.

With those words, an unfathomable weight seems to crumble from Yuzuru’s shoulders, and the floodgates finally open. Javi can only circle his arms around him, kiss the wetness from his cheek, and run his hands through his hair and down his sides.

“Shh,” he soothes by reflex, but Yuzuru’s sobs reverberate through his bones all the same, raw and unbridled. This time, though, there is also something rising from his chest and brimming in his eyes. He pulls him closer, holds him tighter, but even with his eyes closed, it overflows.

They stay like that, for a while. Time flows around them, soon taking their tears with it.

“We’ll talk more tomorrow,” Javi says, later. With how bone-tired he’s feeling himself, he knows Yuzuru must be beyond exhausted.

“I don’t want to sleep,” Yuzuru says again, though he’s clearly starting to drift off. Javi doesn’t ask him why, but Yuzuru continues, gently, “You’re here.”

Oh, he thinks, and something inside him burns. “You know I’ll still be here tomorrow.”

“I know,” Yuzuru sighs. “I know it’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid, it’s important,” he says, and those words feel oddly familiar, rolling off his tongue. “But it’s late now, and you still need to skate in the gala tomorrow. I’ll be right here, I’ll be watching you. And we’ll talk more after that, too.”

“But I have so much I want to say, Javi,” Yuzuru mumbles, fighting a losing battle against the tide of slumber.

“I know,” he assures. “I do, too.”

“And the medal,” Yuzuru remembers, but his eyes are already closed. “I still need…”

“Tomorrow,” Javi promises.

“Yeah?” Yuzuru hums, softening with the sound.

“Mhmm.”

Yuzuru’s fingers loosen from his shirt. “Okay,” he breathes.

And Javi soon follows him to sleep.

-

Morning comes, gently from the night.

They wake up when Yumi walks in with her own card key and finds them cuddled together in one bed, the other missing a pillow but otherwise as pristine as it had been at check-in. Yuzuru refuses to turn around and look her in the eye, and instead he bids her a muffled good morning with his face buried in Javi’s shirt. Javi, on the other hand, is offered no such luxury, so he’s left to greet Yuzuru’s mother with his stuttering, accented Japanese, his face burning beet red.

She takes in the scene for what feels like an eternity of seconds, during which Javi forgets to breathe. Then, her face warms with a familiar expression, and for a moment she looks just like his own mother did, sometimes, whenever her idiot children managed to do something right.

She says something a moment later, and only then does Yuzuru squawk and leap out of bed, scrambling to the bathroom. She smiles and shakes her head, then tells him in English that she’ll be waiting for him outside.

Apparently, Yuzuru explains while changing into his practice gear with lightning speed, he’d forgotten to set his alarm for his morning gala practice, which starts in 30 minutes. Do you have anything to eat for breakfast, Javi asks as he continues to laze in bed. Mom brought, I’ll eat in the car, Yuzuru answers, and he’s ready at the door within the next minute.

But before he leaves, Yuzuru turns around and walks back toward the bed. He stares down at him for a few seconds, then sinks to his knees on the carpeted ground.

With a smile, Javi gets up on his elbows and leans into his warmth.

Daylight streams through the gap in the curtains, drawing a line of light between them. There, Yuzuru meets him with a kiss: softly, sweetly, finally. He’s smiling, too, when they part, and on his face Javi can see the same hope that’s rising within himself, shy but everlasting.

I’ll see you later, Javi murmurs by his cheek.

Okay, Yuzuru says, and he presses his lips into the curls of Javi’s hair.

Then, he stands and walks to the door, and Javi watches with a bright and lingering fondness as he closes it, slowly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finally received my CiONTU T-shirt in the mail today, and it gave me the extra push to finish this final chapter!  
> I'm also super excited to have finally finished a story for the first time in my life (lol), and thank you all for reading through to the end!
> 
> I'd love to hear your thoughts, so comments are adored :)


End file.
